taxime

Thanks to all that have downloaded the TaxiMe iPhone App. To all that haven’t, get on it – it’s only $0.99! I’ve been getting good feedback on the app and some have made suggestions on things to improve. So here is what’s planned in the next release:

• Browse a list of cab contacts in your city
• Flick through various cab contacts upon a successful estimation
• Use/import addresses from your address book
• Minor improvements. i.e. if we can’t find a rate for your city, the app will tell you

These are relatively small improvements but will make a big difference when estimating.  If you have any suggestions or thoughts about these features, well, that’s what the comments are for

After resolving some small issues with TaxiMe the other day, I decided to give the mobile version a slicker look – something more suited for iPhone/Blackberry/Android users.  The mobile version still works with any mobile device, the look is just tailored more-so to those devices.

I decided it was time to give mobile users the ability to have TaxiMe detect their location and use that as a starting point.  If the web browser on your mobile devices is geo-compatible, you will see a button that says “Use your current location as your start address”. Simply press that button and the “From” field will be populated with your latitude/longitude co-ordinates.  Now you just have to fill out where you’re going!

This feature is also available on desktop browsers that support HTML5′s navigation.geolocation.  For example, if you’re in Firefox 3.6 and you go to the www.taxime.ca homepage, you will see the same button that will allow you to use your current address as a starting point. Spread the good news!

We’ve been spending quite some time on building our new REST API. Along with coming close to finishing that, meant that we could redo the mobile version using it. Instead of the mobile view just throwing an error when it can’t find a location, it will attempt to provide suggestions like the TaxiMe homepage.

The mobile version now gives a cab contact upon a successful estimation! HOORAY!
Since we’ve added a significant amount of features to the generic mobile version and are working on an iPhone app, we’ve decided to take down the iPhone layout on the website.
Check back to read about our progress on the iPhone app!

It’s been a long week so far: working full time, researching taxi rates and tweaking/adding new features. Well this one is one that I know a lot of you have been waiting for.

Now if you type in your starting point and we support the rate for that city, TaxiMe will automatically adjust the fare settings. I know some of you live in the cities that aren’t supported, so I’ve offered a temporary solution until the list grows. If you know the rates in your city you can click on “Adjust fare settings”, punch in your rates, check off “Use custom rate” and click save.

The neat thing about this is that if your city isn’t supported, take Scarborough for example, TaxiMe will attempt to find a city in that province/region and use that fare. In this case, it will use Toronto’s fare. It looks at all the cities in that province/region and uses the fares of whichever city is closest to the one you typed in!

Click here for a list of all supported cities.

Over the past few days I’ve been compiling a list of rates for different cities. These will include major cities in the US and most capital cities in Canada. If you search “232 Thomas St, New York, NY” it will check to see if there is a rate for New York and then automatically adjust it for you.

This will take a bit of time but I will be releasing a list of the cities that will be supported. If you know the taxi rates in your city and it’s not listed here, shoot me an email and I’ll put it up.

The next feature on the list is support for mobiles! God it feels good to say that. The original idea of taxime.ca was to target mobile users specifically, now it feels like we’re getting closer to that.

For the geeks: The reason I hadn’t implemented it before is because Google only offers a javascript API for GDirections and most cell phones don’t support javascript. I have recently found a way to get around this – hopefully it’s legal :s

When you’re getting a ride in a cab there and the cab stops, the meter does not stop ticking. This led me to bring in the calculation of wait time. Wait time can mean the cabby is stopped at a red light, stop sign or is just caught is busy traffic. read more »

UPDATE: I just implemented this. Rejoice!

I had a thought the other day that it would be handy if you could pass in the to and from locations into the URL and have it automatically load. I was thinking something like

http://www.taxime.ca/#from=123+Fake+St, Ottawa,ON&to=123+My+St,Ottawa,ON

I will hopefully implement this within the next few days.