[HN Gopher] Show HN: Ambulate - Detailed Trip Planning
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       Show HN: Ambulate - Detailed Trip Planning
        
       Ambulate was created because planning hiking trips using
       spreadsheets and various map solutions got chaotic. I wanted an app
       to manage and map multi day trip itineraries in the
       outdoors/backcountry.  Features - Manage itineraries - Add
       activities and map markers - Add routes (upload GPX or plot by hand
       on map) - Desktop and mobile  It is free to try (login using Google
       or create a user). Alternatively the slides on the home page give
       an idea of the UI.  I'll appreciate any thoughts and feedback you
       care to share:)
        
       Author : _phnd_
       Score  : 66 points
       Date   : 2024-10-22 12:19 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ambulate.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ambulate.app)
        
       | qmarchi wrote:
       | How does this compare against something like Wanderlog?
       | 
       | Would be nice to see a little more detail on the individual
       | features on the main page.
       | 
       | Oh and your copyright is out of date.
        
         | warkdarrior wrote:
         | Are any of these apps open source and available for self
         | hosting? Currently I am using a combination of Google Maps,
         | spreadsheets, Joplin notes, and email to plan my trips. An app
         | that replaces all of that and I can self host would be ideal.
         | 
         | Edit: Additional feature would love to see -- merge the trip
         | plan with photos from the trip and send draft or publish to
         | SSG/blog of choice.
        
       | n4r9 wrote:
       | I love this idea. It's simple, effective, and the UI is great.
       | The account creation process is such a relief. Editing and saving
       | trips is delightfully fast. A few suggestions:
       | 
       | * When adding an activity (or route), I instinctively look for a
       | button at the buttom that says "Save activity". And possibly one
       | that says "Cancel". Right now it's immediately saved and appears
       | on the itinerary. That might be faster, but it leaves me feeling
       | anxious about state.
       | 
       | * The ability to share a Trip with others and even to allow
       | collaboration would be a game-changer. Might require you to allow
       | people to view/create/edit Trips with a "guest" account.
       | 
       | * It would be amazing if there was a way to automatically
       | generate driving or public transport directions and have the
       | Activity and Route both added into the itinerary.
        
       | 1986 wrote:
       | Just a quick note on your landing page on mobile, if you add the
       | following CSS to the slides img element it'll look a lot better
       | across viewports:                   max-width: 100%;
       | object-fit: contain;
        
       | sanjeevverma1 wrote:
       | This is from 2019?
        
       | graysonpike wrote:
       | I don't think the slides are enough to view the app's features. I
       | don't want to create an account just to see the features. Also
       | the auto-advancing slides don't allow me to look closely at the
       | UI.
        
       | MASNeo wrote:
       | I think this needs a non-registered user page. Not feeling to
       | sign up to just have a look.
        
       | mplewis wrote:
       | I need more information on what this can do before I'm willing to
       | create an account.
        
       | renewiltord wrote:
       | You need a demo user. I won't sign up to look at it.
        
         | Supermancho wrote:
         | Same. I plan trips in this EXACT way. Annotated maps alongside
         | itinerary, marking what's optional vs mandatory, etc.
        
         | beAbU wrote:
         | You can put in any email address you want. They don't send a
         | verification link.
         | 
         | I signed up with leave.my.personal@data.alone.com
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | I'm sorry you've not yet tried the plethora of disposable email
         | services
         | 
         | Username: wiwhslhypgtjahnblg@nbmbb.com Password:
         | wiwhslhypgtjahnblg@nbmbb.com
         | 
         | I'll save you the trouble: it's pretty barebones, but I'm
         | guessing it reflects the needs and wants of the author and good
         | for them
        
           | renewiltord wrote:
           | Thank you.
        
       | serendipty01 wrote:
       | Similar: https://waypoint.jakelazaroff.com
        
       | gigel82 wrote:
       | We take trips to Europe every couple of years, usually around a
       | big city with lots of tourist attractions (like Paris / London /
       | etc.); there's a lot of planning involved, sometimes including
       | purchasing tickets using various museum / attraction websites and
       | it's a PITA to keep track of the itinerary and all the e-tickets,
       | timing, etc.
       | 
       | Never found a solution for that particular problem. I tried
       | Wanderlog -which sounds good on paper- but it was too clunky to
       | use. Needs something simple and clean. I like this UI, but it's
       | for a different purpose than going to a city with lots of
       | attractions / museums / restaurants / etc.
        
       | tonymet wrote:
       | this space has huge potential . On one end you have Google &
       | Apple maps that are aimed at efficient commutes. On the other
       | hand you have experiencing planning apps like Tripadvisor, All
       | Trails, Instagram which help you brainstorm on all the
       | adventures.
       | 
       | Eventually you get to a point where you need a detailed itinerary
       | of waypoints, maps, resources etc to help guide a multi-week or
       | multi-month trip.
       | 
       | Currently no app supports this space. it's almost overwhelming to
       | juggle 3 mapping apps (google, apple, gaia), multiple adventure
       | apps , google docs, google sheets and try to run a trip .
       | 
       | And having the content all available offline is key. It's the
       | worst experience being somewhere unfamiliar, with a taxi driver
       | houding you, and you don't know where to go.
        
       | jll29 wrote:
       | If anyone needs a good (related) startup idea, here's one for
       | free:
       | 
       | Complex trip planning for professionals, but in a different way
       | from Ambulate - not hiking trips, but transactions across Web
       | sites: I really hate the way how today you cannot "properly" book
       | a flight, hotel, train like you would do it in a SQL transaction
       | BEGIN TRANSACTION         book train         book flight
       | book hotel       COMMIT;
       | 
       | Only if all three are available and execute the reservation
       | without error do I also want to execute the other ones; that's a
       | prime use case for DB-like transactions, but _across Websites_.
       | Because no point getting only the flight if I have no-where to
       | stay etc.
        
         | dvt wrote:
         | This is what booking.com _kind of_ tries to do, but I think it
         | 's actually a pretty hard problem not only because of
         | scheduling quirks, but often times stuff being delayed, bad
         | weather, etc. will totally throw a wrench into plans.
         | 
         | It would be nice to book a trip with planned contingencies. So
         | basically, no matter what happens, you'll have _something_ to
         | do. This seems kind of a luxury product though, so I 'm not
         | sure how many people would be interested in paying a premium.
        
           | wildrhythms wrote:
           | I can't remember if it was booking.com or some other site
           | like travelocity, but I booked a hotel for work in Dublin, I
           | arrived, and they couldn't find my reservation. After about
           | 30 minutes of the desk staff confusingly clicking around on a
           | computer they 'found' it and I was able to check in. This was
           | a modern hotel too. I stopped using those sites and now only
           | book through the hotel's website, even if it costs more.
        
           | jeffreyrogers wrote:
           | You can't really do it perfectly unless a single site handles
           | all the booking, otherwise you have race conditions, and
           | obviously there's no incentive for airlines, hotels, etc. to
           | give up booking to a third party since they can upsell you on
           | insurance, upgrades, etc.
        
           | kunley wrote:
           | I rather think what booking.com is really trying to do is to
           | get money from car rental and flight ticket companies for
           | embedding links to their sales.
           | 
           | I mean, it's meant to bring benefit to them, not to the user.
        
         | danvoell wrote:
         | Packagers do this. V2 is to throw your negotiations agent into
         | the mix... we are going to book all 3 of these, now, but you
         | need to give us a kickback.
        
         | Karrot_Kream wrote:
         | It sounds like the difficulty is mostly in the "book train",
         | "book flight", and "book hotel" steps along with the associated
         | rollback actions. Booking.com and Expedia probably have built
         | their moat around aggregating these steps. If anyone works in
         | this industry, I'd love to know if that's not the case.
        
       | Atixx wrote:
       | For everyone just having a look, you can create an account with
       | any email to check it out as a demo user, no personal information
       | needs to be shared
        
       | HomeDeLaPot wrote:
       | Darn, I was hoping this was a scooter trip planning app:
       | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5cffMbZV8E0
        
       | ojbyrne wrote:
       | Obligatory link: https://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-
       | software-the-most-...
        
       | almog wrote:
       | I'll start with the least important detail but the first one I
       | noticed: the main page features an example image that shows
       | mountains scenery that could have been the foothill of the divide
       | from the south west (based on the combination of the vegetation
       | and peaks), however, the trip planning details are for somewhere
       | in Norway which was very confusing until I checked and saw it was
       | an AI generated image.
       | 
       | But to the more important stuff: the main tools I've been using
       | for trail/route planning (for over 6K miles) are Gaia and
       | CalTopo. These tools have a lot of route building tools and
       | overlays for both planning and navigation and I guess you don't
       | want to replace these tools and if you acknowledge hikers are
       | using these tools already and see a way to complement them
       | somehow, I think you want to let the user directly reference
       | their tracks/routes from within Ambulate as it's unlikely they'd
       | like to replicate their work in another tool.
        
       | uladzislau wrote:
       | Unusable on mobile unfortunately
        
       | manav wrote:
       | I get that ambulate just means to walk around but it gives the
       | sense to something medical (as an American).
        
         | allenu wrote:
         | That was my reaction as well to seeing the name. It makes me
         | think of both ambulance and amputate, which are not good
         | associations.
        
           | aspenmayer wrote:
           | The usage of the word is reminiscent of ambulatory which has
           | a distinctive medical jargon connotation to my ear.
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-22 23:00 UTC)