taxime

I had gotten a phone call today with a bug report when you searched something like

From: 10 Albert St, Regina
To: 55 Montreal St, Regina

TaxiMe would come back and say “Did you mean…”

After providing support for major Canadian cities, we’ve just added support for 7 more American cities! View all supported cities here

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

This morning has been an exciting one, Tracey Tong from the Metro decided to write an article about Taxi Me. The article can be found here http://www.metronews.ca/ottawa/local/article/155596

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. (more…)

I’ve scrapped the previous feature I posted about – why you ask? Because it was starting to turn a simple app into something more complex. This app does not require presets for different cities, if you know what your city’s cab fare is then you can enter the fare and save it. It should not be harder than that.

I do agree that we should have a list of different cities and cab rates for the user to get an idea what they should plug in. This is in the works.

I’ve been getting requests from people to buy the app or ask if they could integrate it into their site. That got me thinking… Why not? I should create a little web widget for blogs and what not.

I’ll keep everyone posted on the progress!

I’m sorry to say but to use Taxi Me on your mobile, you need javascript. I would implement a PHP/server-side version so that i’d be accessible for all users but it has to do with the fact that Google only offers the GDirections API in javascript. I’m praying for them to come out with it via HTTP but it’s not looking the greatest.

Google has a thread opened for this feature request so I encourage people to “star” it to help Google make this change. If this doesn’t come into play soon, I will find a workaround.

http://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=235

I recently came across a strange bug the other day on Safari. Whenever you typed in the address Safari would strip out the commas before storing it in a javascript cookie. I searched around but didn’t find anything on it, so I came up with a workaround which was just a simple decode/encode function to filter the comma back in.

This would explain why if you typed in “123 Fake St, City, PROV” you would come back to the site and it would only say “123 Fake St”. It was stripping – not that kind of stripping – but yes, character stripping my commas!

The bug is fixed and now iPhone users can stop sending me death threats

What do you think we should add or make changes to?