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Comment by pahn | Hacker News Reader

I made an interactive art installation on this question once: A black box with a knob where you could adjust how much time you have, then it would offer you (Google streetview) panoramas of the locations it found within your distance, and in the end even print a paper slip with your travel itinerary to take with you.

The installation used realtime data (Google directions API): I somehow figured out, that if I would run this from a local machine and reset the browser frequently, Google would let me do this even without an API key… they certainly sensed something was awry and I did get API warnings and captchas because of 'suspicious traffic on my network', but they were nice enough not to block me completely. I strongly doubt this would still work though, this was in 2017.

Pictures and videos of the installation: https://maschinenzeitmaschine.de/derweil/

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I have been wishing Apple or Google maps would add this as a feature for at least five years now. When I’m in a new city for work, and I know I have 90 minutes til my next meeting, it would be massively helpful to see every lunch place in a 15-25 minute walking radius. The fact that there’s still not a “search/filter by transit time” feature in any Maps app seems like proof there’s not enough competition in that space in 2022.

I think what Maps really needs is more widgets that reduce the screen real estate of the map until we can finally drop that feature entirely.

On iphone 4 there is no map left now

Then you'd love degoogled android!

I'm shocked how many apps rely on the google maps widget. It's expensive and mediocre, and ridiculously flaky on my phone.

The web touch UI is laughable, but at least the average third party occluding widget size keeps growing on mobile web pages -- I wouldn't want more than 10% of my phablet screen to be wasted displaying the map I just pulled up, after all!

I started a similar project a few years ago and the real problem for any new player is just data availability. I was able to get Open Street Map data, but I also needed data on businesses with ratings and photos. IMO this creates a huge moat against anyone entering the market.

There is also Mapillary (now owned by Facebook unfortunately) and Yelp. I am not familiar with their APIs however.

Not sure about Mapillary, but Yelp license agreement were to restrictive for me and I assume for most really interesting use cases

I made this app a bunch of years ago where I sourced events starting in the next 0-3 hours nearby. Unfortunately not enough people had this problem. Still found it useful.

Have you tried a "restaurants near X" query? In my experience it's smart enough to calibrate "near" to your surroundings (walking distance in cities, driving distance in suburbia).

Overpass[0] is made for exactly these kinds of queries, I'd recommend playing with it.

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_AP...

Before I had a car, or at times when I don't feel like driving, one of the problems I have is friends who always want to find a place to meet that is "between" us or "near me" where they use an Euclidian metric rather than a public transit time metric.

Very often "within a 10 minute walk of ANY train station" is preferable to "halfway between us", even if the train ride is 1 hour, because I can actually work (or catch up on sleep) on a train. Especially if that "halfway between us" is somewhere without transit which means I need to drive the whole way there.

Quite a few. Used this one, while in the US: https://www.meetways.com/

Very cool. Slightly reminds me of an app I made for fun a few years ago that created a visual diary of your location history over the past 48 hours by pairing it with Google Streetview imagery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpreu_pFI2A

that's a pretty cool project!

Awesome

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