New Version of Trip Planner Launched

Last week we launched a new version of the trip planner. On the surface, it doesn’t look much different from the previous version, but “under the hood”* it has changed significantly. Moving forward, it should be easier for us to add new features and fix any issues that come up (and issues are sure to come up, as you may have noticed already).

We’d love to hear your feedback on any aspect of the trip planner–what features we should add, what doesn’t work for you, etc. Please keep in mind though that the trip planner is a complicated beast and we have very limited resources with which to make improvements.

That brings me to the next topic, which is byCycle’s financial status. Since the start of the year, we have only generated $151.60 in revenue. At this rate, byCycle is not going to be “in business” much longer. We are looking into ways to remedy this situation. In the meantime, we could sure use some community support. Please consider making a donation or buying something from our online store.

In the next edition (coming soon), I’m going to write about the latest developments in our relationship with Metro**–stay tuned!

–Wyatt

* Ironic, I know. I would like to say “under the [part of the bike that contains all the complicated and mysterious machinery]” but most everything on a bike is out in the open or available for relatively easy inspection.

** Metro is the Portland area’s regional government.

Scroll Wheel Zooming Added

A few days ago Google added scroll wheel zooming to their public maps API. Today, I enabled that feature in the trip planner. It was really simple, only requiring the addition of one line of JavaScript code.

This feature has been available on the official Google Maps site for a while, but it wasn’t available to third party developers until three days ago [1].

Another feature Google released recently is the ability to encode long lines for more efficient rendering. For long routes, this means the annoying “this script is taking a long time, do you want to continue popup” shouldn’t come up again.

We haven’t incorporated this into the trip planner yet but will some time in the next week or so (it’s a bit more complicated than adding scroll wheel zooming). I wrote some code that does the line encoding; now I just need to set up the back end to encode lines before sending them to the Web.

[1] Google Maps blog post about scroll wheel zooming