taxime

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!

We’ve just finished making TaxiMe a little smarter. Now if you’re unsure of the address of the place you’re trying to get to but you know the name, go ahead and type that in.

Example: “Quiznos Ottawa” or “Burger King Vancouver”. TaxiMe will then show a list of 4 possibile addresses. At the moment Google only lets you show the first 4 but we are working on ways around this.

Unfortunately, the searching by business only works on the website and the iPhone. We will have it working for generic mobiles shortly.

A bug has also been squashed (previous post). Now, this only occured on some addresses but if you searched “90 Queen St, Ottawa”, TaxiMe would give a “Did you mean” prompt with a list of the same addresses below. Once you clicked on it, it would just loop and ask you the same question. The problem is that Google sees 4 possibilities for “90 Queen St” in the Ottawa area so you need to go a little more in depth with which one you want. The fix: if you click on one, you will now see that the input has been populated with latitude/longitude co-ordinates. This seems to work.

Not long after Taxi Me was launched I had started to receive emails asking for a mobile version. This was already in the plans but we just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

After mocking up the first design for the generic mobile, Shawn and I realized that the design was not going to work for the mobile and that it needed to be extremely basic. So we took that design, made some tweaks and are now using it for the iPhone layout!

It still needs a little touching up but it works pretty well. We are using this layout for all mobiles at the moment but will soon have a separate one for the generic mobile and BlackBerry. Note: Your mobile must support Javascript (until Google offers the support we need for PHP).

Let us know what you think. Do ya dig it? Is it your new homepage? Have you convinced your parents to get you an iPhone just to see this layout?