93 points by _phnd_ 8 months ago | 57 comments
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:)
jll29 8 months ago
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.Karrot_Kream 8 months ago
dvt 8 months ago
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.
SoftTalker 8 months ago
jeffreyrogers 8 months ago
madeofpalk 8 months ago
Airlines, hotels, etc give up booking all the time to third parties. That's what booking.com is.
jeffreyrogers 8 months ago
wildrhythms 8 months ago
Gud 8 months ago
I did however run into an even worse bug on their platform once where my card got billed, but right after the website crashed and a confirmation never was sent. Naturally, this happened when I had little funds myself.
I called customer support and without a booking number they couldn’t do anything, which I naturally never received…
Thankfully, the money was refunded within 24 hours.
Still I use booking.com, I consider it a great service.
devilbunny 8 months ago
I have resorted to making most reservations by phone, rather than Internet, because it’s the only way to be sure. I don’t like it, it wastes my time, but I have a specific person I can call out who flat-out lied to me if I get there and the room has no bathtub. That is usually enough to get the manager to upgrade me to a room that has the one amenity I specifically requested as a condition of booking.
ornornor 8 months ago
devilbunny 8 months ago
I’m not draining an aquifer. Other than the cost of the treated water, there is no practical limit to use (the city is nowhere nearly large enough to stress the supply). There are golf courses near the river that just filter out the silt and pump it directly onto the courses.
kunley 8 months ago
I mean, it's meant to bring benefit to them, not to the user.
MarkMarine 8 months ago
Funny thing is this is already a job when I thought about it. Travel agents used to do this, now it feels like going to a “financial advisor” where they are more interested in selling you the package with a kickback
warbaker 8 months ago
mromanuk 8 months ago
danvoell 8 months ago
garlicpowder 8 months ago
n4r9 8 months ago
* 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.
_phnd_ 8 months ago
Currently all changes need to be manually saved by clicking on the blue Save trip button on the top of the itinerary. I'll give it some thought.
Sharing trips is indeed a very cool feature that is high up on the todo list.
Auto generating routes is also a great idea, I'll look into it, cheers!
almog 8 months ago
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.
_phnd_ 8 months ago
Ambulate supports importing tracks/routes GPX files, such that route planning could be done in e.g. Gaia or CalTopo and then exported as GPX and finally imported to Ambulate.
On a similar note all routes in Ambulate can be exported as GPX, so they can be imported to other tools e.g. navigation apps or GPS devices.
AFAIK neither Gaia or CalTopo have public APIs, but they both seem to support sharing in some form, perhaps it is possible for other applications, like Ambulate, to access routes directly saving the the GPX export/import steps? I'll add this as a issue for further investigation, thanks!
gigel82 8 months ago
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.
_phnd_ 8 months ago
mplewis 8 months ago
1986 8 months ago
max-width: 100%;
object-fit: contain;
_phnd_ 8 months ago
manav 8 months ago
allenu 8 months ago
aspenmayer 8 months ago
renewiltord 8 months ago
beAbU 8 months ago
I signed up with leave.my.personal@data.alone.com
Supermancho 8 months ago
mdaniel 8 months ago
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 8 months ago
qmarchi 8 months ago
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.
gelatocar 8 months ago
They had also gone big on AI slop for recommendations which made it really hard to trust any advice in the lists of things to do.
I think these sort of travel apps are really hard to find an audience for. Very very few people travel often enough to pay a subscription and it is hard to justify spending significant money as a one-off purchase when traveling is already so expensive.
_phnd_ 8 months ago
Wanderlog seems to be more about organizing the overall activities, where the travel activities are just points on the itinerary, e.g. get a flight from A to B.
Copyright is updated, thanks for pointing that out!
warkdarrior 8 months ago
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.
_phnd_ 8 months ago
It depends on Firebase for authorization and a S3 bucket for storage.
Copy dotenv.local_example to .env.local and add relevant info, then use npm run serve, to run locally.
Nice idea to merge trip plan and photos:)
serendipty01 8 months ago
_phnd_ 8 months ago
Seems that the main difference is that Ambulate supports manually plotting routes/uploading GPX routes and annotating the map with markers.
Often times in the back country the points you want on the map do not lend themselves to looking up by name.
serendipty01 8 months ago
clementmas 8 months ago
I created https://travelmap.net/itinerary to trace my itineraries.
_phnd_ 8 months ago
tonymet 8 months ago
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.
_phnd_ 8 months ago
You are exactly right about offline being key! Routes are downloadable to your devices. A future feature is to export the whole trip itinerary and maps to pdf for offline use.
HomeDeLaPot 8 months ago
_phnd_ 8 months ago
Atixx 8 months ago
ojbyrne 8 months ago
uladzislau 8 months ago
_phnd_ 8 months ago
What OS and browser where you using?
sanjeevverma1 8 months ago
_phnd_ 8 months ago
graysonpike 8 months ago
MASNeo 8 months ago
gacklecackle 8 months ago