Horcon Boys
Team Members
- Alberto
- Kilian Barrera
- cartuchogl
- alejandrogq
What
Plan your own trip or invite your friends to join too.
Features:
* Create and plan trips with your friends in a collaborative way (anyone participating on the trip can edit the trip)
* Decide your itinerary and the activities (vote which activities to do etc.)
* Invite your friends to collaborate on the trip organization
* View your itinerary on the map
* Vote activities
* Comment trips and days
Planned features/improvements:
* Activity feed of your trips
* To-do list
* Packing list
* Improve voting system for itineraries and activities
* Estimate your travel budget
* Improve the interface
* Integration with Flickr
Where
- Entry URL:
http://triphq.r09.railsrumble.com- Info / Screencast URL:
- http://triphq.net/
How
* Bort (Rails boilerplate) http://github.com/aentos/bort
* Gravtastic (Gravatar) http://github.com/chrislloyd/gravtastic
* Simple CSS (CSS framework) http://rgarcia.cl/simple/index.html
* Icons from Pinvoke.com http://www.pinvoke.com/
* Less CSS http://lesscss.org/
* YM4R-GM http://github.com/queso/ym4r-gm
* mislav-will_paginate
* rubyist-aasm
* thoughtbot-factory_girl
* capistrano
* ruby-openid
* rspec & rspec-rails
* annotate_models
* asset_packager
* database_cleaner
* exception_notification
* forgot_password
* jrails
* less-for-rais
* cucumber
Comments
Hi Thomas!
Glad you liked it! Thanks!
A good start to an app that has potential. You can add so much to this, but the trick would be to do so without making it feel bloated: related links with info about the destination, places to eat, sleep, party… Nice job!
Hi Ben,
thanks for your review. Seems really fair to me and i really appreciate your detailed review and your tips for future improvements.
On the matter of differentiating triphq from other sites, our idea is about planning the trip in a collaborative way right from the start. Using other sites (from what i know) you would start thinking of the dates you want to fly, booking the flights and hotels, etc. and then entering that data into the website (through the web interface or email).
Our idea was more like this:
1. A group of friends want to travel together
2. They start entering the proposals for the itinerary and the daily activities (e.g. 3 days in Madrid, we could do this and that, and then 5 days off to London, let’s do blabla…)
3. They can vote and comment each of the days and activites, remove days or destinations (pretty much like in a wiki, anyone can edit the trip). In this way they start build the “definitive” itinerary
4. Once they have settled on the itinerary etc. they can start looking for flights, hotels, etc. and continue planning. Maybe enter some more detailed data like the price for the activities or transport etc.
The idea was about building a tool to help you decide what to do, take decisions, have discussions, etc. and then having that data to help you plan your trip.
Every time we organize a trip with a group of friends it takes a lot of emails and phone calls (when would you be able to fly, how long can you stay, do you prefer madrid or barcelona, etc. etc.) to get organized. We just wanted to simplify that.
Other ideas we had but didn’t have time to implement:
On the matter of polishing there were quite a few things what needed some more fine tuning, like, obviously the autocompleter for the cities, the vote functionality, etc. but as you know 48 hours is a really short period of time.
Thanks for the review. Your feedback is very useful to us!
I’m a heavy Dopplr/Tripit user, so I’m already a user of this sort of app.
The design is pretty darn nice – better than Tripit’s, but not quite to Dopplr’s level. There are a number of polish/final touches that would help out, though – date formats, spacing issues, etc. I like the color scheme and the whitespace. I’m a little concerned that you might have overused the curly braces… There are also some interface issues, particularly around the autocomplete for cities. I typed in “Durham, NC” and it was rejected (you were looking for “Durham, North Carolina, United States”), and it never found Boston, MA. In addition, it’s a little tricky to find the links to add activities and comments.
I think you’ve got a good start on features, but it’s still got a pretty high barrier to entry. Of course, the best interface for that we’ve seen so far is email – and it would take much longer than 48 hours to implement (well). As for viewing – you might want to customize a mobile view so that people don’t have to lug their laptops around or squint to see a large site on a small screen.
I wouldn’t say this market is crowded, but you are following in the footsteps of at least two big sites, and I don’t know that you’ve differentiated yourself enough from them. In fact, the only real feature I can see that you have that they don’t (or don’t promote) is the budgeting piece, but that’s relatively minor. You’ll really want to figure out why you’re better if you want to grow this after the Rumble.
That said, I think the site is fairly useful. Once you get past the (considerable) barrier of having to enter everything by hand, it could be a nice summary of your plans for some trips – as long as you’re not going to Boston.
Solid start, but could use more work.
Glad you liked our app, thanks! :)
One of my favorite apps in the judging. I really liked that they pulled in some 3rd party data (google maps) which almost none of the other apps I’m judging have done.