Comment by danielbarla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielbarla | Hacker News Reader

My everyday use case for navigation is along the lines of having a buddy tell me to avoid a certain route, due to traffic.

I've tried Google Maps and Waze (as well as Google's dashboard thing which keeps a semi-permanent time estimate pinned to some area on your phone), but these all miss the main point in my use case - I only need an detour away from my daily commute maybe twice a month. On the rest of the days, I know how to drive home, thanks. This is not enough for me to be semi-permanently firing up heavy apps to check the route. A simple thing which says "hey, I've noticed you just got in your car, and you're probably heading home - don't take highway X" would be nearly perfect.

It's the same for weather apps. It would be cool to just get a notification when about to head out: "hey, you might want to take a scarf with you today, it's a bit chilly!"

Try Dark Sky. It has configurable alerts for bad weather etc. I get a daily prediction notification every morning a bit after I get up (to help choose what to wear), and as needed for bad weather.

Google Maps has commute updates. If you tell it what your commute is, on Android anyway, you'll get a discrete notification telling you how long the route home is, and a very quick summary of what route to take (for me it says either the name of the highway I take, or the name of the longest non-highway road on the alternative route). It works well and doesn't require you to actively check the complete route.

If there are major incidents and your route home is much longer than usual, you should get a more visible notification.

Google Now, despite it's abandonware status, solves this use case by telling me when my commute has an incident.

Thanks for the tip, I will check it out. From a quick read, it still sounds like the information is a pull (from my perspective, so I'll have to keep checking it), rather than the app notifying me when traffic is horrible?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com