Show HN: Hewell, a travel app powered by WikiData

Hey all!

I'm an indie ios/web developer and I build Hewell (pronounced the same as Huell (and a reference maybe some of you old-school PBS viewers may get).

I've wanted an app like this for a long time, but most travel guide apps have really high production values and consequently low coverage. Lots of apps can give you a bespoke experience in San Francisco, but few work well everywhere (custom voice over is expensive). Hewell bypasses all of that by leveraging the power of WikiData and Siri.

Hewell was originally dreamt up by a myself and a few friends at a happy hour ~2016, but I'd never gotten around to actually building it until last year during lockdown--which honestly wasn't a great time to launch a travel app. Now that things are opening back up and people are traveling again, hopefully Hewell will be more useful.

I know I would have loved an app like this when I was in Japan a few years back. I knew there was so much history all around me, and I probably missed a lot of it. That said I've found Hewell useful even at home. There's a lot of hidden treasures in major cities.

In the future I'd like to add a "Tour Mode" that can guide you along a route or recommend places to go while you're driving or walking.

If you like the app, please consider donating. If the app makes enough money I'd like to donate a sizable chunk of the revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation since they make Hewell possible.

Links:

Announcement Blog Post: https://brianschrader.com/archive/announcing-hewell-public-b...

My Apps: https://skyrocket.software

Hi there. I installed this and here's some feedback: I can't have any idea of the app because of my location. My experience can be summed up as: cold start. Why are you limiting the user with GPS location? Maybe I want to get an idea about a place I dream of traveling. Within: 15 km cannot satisfy this need. Plus if you suggest me to try "More: Within 15 km", maybe you can show a single-tap button to do it? I feel it's tiring to read the small text, understand it, don't know it (since I didn't go to preferences screen yet) and there update and come back. Bad UX.

Congrats for the launch.

looks really promising. I usually hate apps and phones and and this is the first time in years I thought I have a reason to not "forget" my phone when I go out. can't wait until it hits android:

> The Hewell beta is for iOS users only.

> You must also have Testflight installed.

> This beta isn't accepting any new testers right now.

For what it's worth, Wikipedia has a page that will actually show you articles nearby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby

It's quite rudimentary and nowhere near as nice as this: just shows a simple, plain list. One nice thing is that it just resolves to coordinates, so if you happen to know coordinates of interest, you can just enter those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/40.7128,...

This is really cool! I think this is a really under-serviced space and there's a lot of room for innovation here.

I started making https://waystops.com a while back in a similar vein, although it's more aimed at higher-level exploration of destinations and places to visit than local things to do. I use the wikivoyage dataset to power a lot of it; you may want to check that out too as there is a lot of useful data in there.

I don't have an iPhone so I can't try it myself, but just in case you're not familiar with it yet (though I suspect you are), Wikivoyage is another Wikimedia project that could probably prove valuable: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Main_Page

Looks great, just tried it.

One feature that is missing: "reload map" or something. It's only showing things near my "real location"; but I'd also like to explore different locations (e.g. a city I'd like to visit next weekend).

For example "Komoot" is doing that really nice for hiking routes and similar activites: explore at my location, explore near a given location, use the map, ...

Hey, I like the premise of the app, but I face one major problem when using it (on an IPad 2019): once I have selected a place from the map view (so that I can review it, get the route etc.), it is not possible to go back to the map view. Am I missing something, or is this a bug?

This is nice. I used to work for Gogobot/trip.com back in the day and its great to see new players in the market. Any plans to incorporate user reviews to points of interest?

Great stuff! I also wanted an app like this, so I built https://app.mirrorspace.net - which looks pretty similar to yours albeit less polished.

Thanks! This is what I was looking for after google trips went off. Would be nice to have on android as well :)

I think there's a typo in the submitted URL, should be https://hewellapp.com/

Not to be negative, but change the name. Don't know how to say it and has nothing going for it.