I'm starting a startup: An apartment with a view finder

nothingless.github.io

4 points·get··5 comments

Programmatically finding whether or not a specific apartment has windows facing in the right direction would be an interesting challenge.

Is the direction important to you? Personally, I just want to be able to look over the city. And not have another house in front of me.

At first I will simply go through all listings for each city manually. Looking at the photos and the reviews. And make a list of the ones with a view.

The direction of the view determines when/if light enters the building. North facing views won't put sunbeams on a person's morning coffee (in Europe, Australia etc. are different), that's important to some people, not to others.

To put it another way, once a person cares about the view when picking a location, the person is likely to become picky. I might be fine looking out a cell tower five blocks away, another person isn't. They prefer trees 30m away.

Yup. That's why I'll give them a list. So they can chose between the tower and the trees.

The direction the windows face literally determines what the view is, so yes, it's important. If you have accurate map data then it should be possible to programmatically determine what the view is, whether it's blocked, where the sun comes in the window during the day, etc. That would be fun to code. But it all depends on your map data...

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