Montreal Bus Stop Locator Site Updates
Cet article est disponible en français ici.
So far, the response has been great for my little utility, even though I'm not making an active advertising.
Using some Microsoft terminology, I'm dogfooding my own application and I found a few points that could be enhanced a bit :
- Now, if using Google Gears, you are not automatically redirected to the stop list for your location. You simply see a small map of where you're supposed to be, and you're offered a other button to choose to use that location.
- Some error messages are displayed when typing incorrect or missing data. That could be confusing...
- All maps are now using all the available width of the screen. That means that the image is not resized poorly on a mobile device. Still, I wonder how the iPhone wil behave with this...
- I fixed a bit the distance display to display Km instead of meters if appropriate, even though if you are in an other city, you'll still be offered some reaaaally long distance.
I'm still wondering if I need to filter out people that are outside Montreal. The point of this site is also to be a technological proof-of-concept for GeoLocation, so even if the distance is not usable, it's still a valuable information. - I've also added some street name samples to help people that are not from Montreal to see what the site can do. I've taken a random intersection and bus stop code that can be typed in directly.
- I also made some XHTML compliance, for what it's worth :)
Now, I think I'll try to make sure that Google search will find the site in both French and English languages because right now, I'm having the same problems I did have with my Remote Control software pages. Google's crawling without specifying a language, so for this site, English is going to come out, since it is the default language. Maybe I'll add a "/fr" and "/en" virtual base for each of them.
I'm always interested in any suggestions or bug reports !