Show HN: I open-sourced my travel planning startup, Wanderlust | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I open-sourced my travel planning startup, Wanderlust

mywanderlust.co

117 pointsdanecjensen59 comments

I'm working on something similar at http://tripovore.com

Basically I think city guides are obsolete (they have been there for 200 years with no major innovation) and have to be reinvented and trip planning automatized using APIs we have online. I currently use 6 of them: foursquare, songkick, instagram, google places, google translate and facebook. I've been working on this for the past 8 months, but I'm having UX difficulties keeping such a complex problem as simple as possible. I first started this during the foursquare hackathon 2011 and the project won the grand prize (called my next trip at that time).

Would love to hear any feedbacks you got at feedback@tripovore.com

Thanks!

It took me 10 seconds to go from your landing page to a really useful page full of things to do in Berlin. Awesome work!

Thank you ! I really think the main problem with most of those apps is that you have to register to do anything. I was trying to avoid that.

This looks awesome! Love how the UI works and simplicity of it all. Very intuitive.

Thank you !

UI-wise you win big time. But where is your code repository?

Thanks. Not sure if I'm ready to open the source code.

Nice ui. Your blog doesn't load btw.

Thanks man. Yeah I haven't had the time to write on it. Just the About page: http://blog.tripovore.com/about/

Wow, really like the visuals. A quick suggestion would be to have the route shown on the map. It would provide a visual tie-in with suggested itinerary.

Keep up the great work!

Thanks man. Routes are hard to do with Google Maps + Google Directions. But you get an idea of the walking time it would take you, between steps. But there's a bug I have to fix there.

Would love to know what's the source of the location name autocomplete, this is not the first page where my city name of "Taipei" gets corrected to merely "Da-an District, Taiwan" - no city name, just one of the many districts of the city. If I wasn't living here, it would be mighty confusing.

Google Places API

I've been working on this for 2-3 months and realized I don't have enough time to donate to it. So, I open sourced it. I always envisioned it paired with a mobile app. It's written in AngularJS and Rails hopefully someone can start helping me where I left off.

Thanks, there are parts of this that I really like. I'm hopeful that more developers will follow in this trend and release their projects in works as open source projects.

Incidentally in reviewing I also came across some of your other projects, (sockclub.com, cam.ly etc) - kudos on taking your ideas all the way!

Saw this on /r/SideProject. Excellent work.

This is a great idea. Nice work. I'm probably the only one here but everytime i see open source I run to github hoping for a python project but almost always am looking at ROR .... oh well

We need more open source Django

Not sure what you mean - this is actually built with RoR.

i know i am saying i wish more projects like this were written in django - that is it

Got it now - thanks :)

We need more open source PHP.

Here's the link to Github repo:

https://github.com/danecjensen/mywanderlust

Somebody has a hankering for starbucks:

http://mywanderlust.co/trips/c8b8d9b3444c2dce21fcf12063101b7...

Nice app :) Once you have decided all the destinations you'd like to see, it'd be sweet if it could tell you how to go there (i.e. plan the optimal route)

I did this side project http://www.routific.com to do route optimization (you can also specify time-windows, which would be neat for opening/closing hours) -- the algorithm is open source: https://github.com/mck-/Open-VRP -- perhaps an idea to integrate it?

Half-off topic/rant: I would love if trip route planning tools could take into account public open/close time information. Twice I've been in the South Dakota area on road trips, and each time I miss being able to see the Minute Man silo site near Rapid City because they lock the fence up around it outside of visitor hours for security reasons:

http://www.nps.gov/mimi/planyourvisit/hours.htm

TL;DR Please incorporate open/close time data in travel planning apps!

This is great.. why dont you pursue further? Looks like some of it is coming from 4sq api, I can help you there if you are stuck.

Kudos on working on it, and hope you find time to continue building on it. One specific feature that will make it so much easier is if there was a way to bootstrap your list. May be display top tourist locations to start with.. you can also search for tiplists on foursquare to give user starting point. Not sure if you already do that, and I just couldnt figure out..

Thanks for the kind words and feedback. I agree about bootstrapping a list. Suggested places feature is a top priority. Do you work for 4sq? If so please email me: hn handle at gmail

Wow nice work. When I travel outside I usually use wikipedia to get a list of places where I should go. But a direct recommendation from friends is a lot better since wikipedia lists only places/things that are relatively popular.

I think a mobile app that keeps track of the paces you have been and then syncs it to wanderlust for friends to see could be really good. I think facebook does it but here it would make sense.

Really good work.

There's already a Wanderlust:

https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust

...Really? There's thousands of projects with the same names.

Is there any other open-sourced trip planning code? The main one I could find on github is OpenTripPlanner [https://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner]

The travel industry is plagued by Trip planning startups that don't make it. I would have thought one of these might have open-sourced their code before.

I couldn't find any open source projects when I looked before I started the project. It's a good point that the internet is filled with trip planning software. I found many web apps but I didn't love any of them. Hopefully this will bring us a closer to a trip planning webapp that actually works.

You guys might want to add some content. Screenshots for search response to:

* Berlin: http://minus.com/lbzErr5MEypU8x

* Paris: http://minus.com/lpG6vZUm8QuI4

* Prague: http://minus.com/lbiTwT6lsWNKzQ

I love the app. Very simple and easy to use, I would include facebook as you move towards mobile. It would be nice to see what my trips and plans my friends have in their travels and being able to browse that would prompt me to use the app more and keep me on the app longer. More of a UX comment for the future but I hope it helps. Keep it up. #teamopensource

Wow that is wonderful! Great idea! I have a tourism related startup I shut down 1 year ago, very similar to this, but it was more basic. I was write it in rails as well.

I need a week off from work and I can make the UI translatable and finish the Hungarian translation if you are interested.

I did not check the source, is it planned to show recommended destinations after I selected a city?

Recommendations/or Suggested Places is a feature on top of the priority list.

I had created a travel app very very similar to yours earlier this year using RoR and AngularJS as well. Eventually it fell on the wayside. I just open sourced it: https://github.com/jesalg/Travelizer

We should talk about how to collaborate our efforts.

Awesome. I downloaded the project but was having trouble creating a user. I want to know more about your project.

Ok I'll shoot you an email.

Cheers, this is interesting as I've recently started a travel planning project, incorporating prices of flights, lately. Would love to chat to others who've gained traction, and started making sales in this area.

I get a message saying "No such app". Does anyone else have this problem?

http://i.imgur.com/nILZbsh.png

I don't know how you ended up at the www subdomain but try the naked domain mywanderlust.co without the www. Also, I fixed the www domain.

Nice app.

I think Comp Sci classes should take these have baked start-ups and let students take a crack at them.

So after you add your destinations what are you supposed to do?

Genuine question: Can someone explain how this is different from something like Yelp's lists?

Is this concept more of a 'share your route'?

Suggestion: Maybe you can change the messaging on the landing page.

"Build your Perfect trip." or something along those lines might be good.

Cool stuff!

Looks nice. Where are you getting the destinations data from?

This would take about a hour to code in Meteor and quite a bit less code as well. Nice job though, love the idea!

No, it wouldn't.

then maybe you should check out http://madewith.meteor.com/ for some examples and check out the code

Seriously, what is the point of making such a pointless statement like "meh, this would take an hour in Meteor"?

Is it because "Meteor will kill Rails" is the buzzy headline of the week on HN, and you felt the need to be trendy and throw that into the discussion in this thread? What value does a comment like that add to discussion about a developer releasing a project he worked on for a few months to the open source community?

First off, it's not baseless, it really would take an hour or two for someone who is familiar with Meteor, since it's built for helping you create exactly this type of applications. I was not discounting the work that was done but pointing out that a better platform for this application corner case would be something actually built to support real-time web applications from the ground up with less context switching, such as a full JavaScript solution. It would simply take less time and resources to build it all in JavaScript from the beginning if you're familiar with it, whether the framework was Meteor or other frameworks. There's nothing trendy about this value judgement. Which specific part do you disagree with? I'm not saying that Meteor is killing RoR, now you're bringing your own bias and baggage from other stories that you disagree with into this discussion. My point was for this specific application case, not broadly for all applications and implementations.

And you did it!

Go on. Show your meteor version to us in, let's be generous, two hours.

Like I said in a previous thread, as far as building a Meteor clone, challenge accepted. As soon as I get off work in a few hours, I'll get started.

Well done!

People grossly underestimate time it takes to figure out what to build, how to design UX, which APIs to use, how the workflow works. And all the inspiration that goes into coming up with something new.

Sure, if you are given a working website, and you were to replicate exact copy of it, you can do it far faster

(still not sure about 1 hour estimate-- show us if you really mean it).

Absolutely, I agree that a heck of a lot more time than 1 hour would go towards figuring out the entire user flows, UI etc. I never meant to discount that aspect and that's where some of the negative karma here is coming from.

As far as building a Meteor clone, challenge accepted. As soon as I get off work in a few hours, I'll get banging.

As promised, I cloned the functionality of the showcased project in Meteor in 1 hour. Finished product: https://travel.meteor.com Source code: https://github.com/andreioprisan/meteor-travel

And here's the obligatory Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657849

Reply on news.ycombinator.com