distributedlife

I’ve finished placing all the trainlines in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and I’ve almost finished Singapore. Data entry can be a tedius task at times and there are some usability flaws that trainlines has, that make it harder than it should be.

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed is learning little things about places I want to go and see. In Malaysia on the island of Borneo there is a train route and a couple of the stations can’t be found in Google maps. They have a name and that is all. The rail site claims they stop there but from the terrain and satellite view it appears like a mountainous tree filled valley. I want to go there.

Another is the TranzAlpine train route in New Zealand that winds between mountains and by riverbeds. I’m sure it will be breathtaking journey.

To help with exploring, I have an upcoming feature that will show flickr photos that are within 10kms of a train station. Here is an example of how google does it now with panaramio.

One of the things I’ve been toying with of late is board game and card game design. To me it’s nice alterative to computer game design because it allows for rapid prototyping. One of the biggest difficulties we had trying to make No Horizons was being able see if something was going to work. With card and board games I can make the board and the cards in an evening and run through a few iterations to see how it plays.

One of the things I intend to talk about is blogging about the iterative design process of game design. What I learned from each attempt and some explanations on why I went for one feature over another.

I love bookstores; I love to wander around them sipping coffee and pondering over which book I want to buy. Bookstores offer something that isn’t done well, in my experience, in electronic book shops and that is the process of discovery. It’s easier to discover a new, interesting book in a book store than it is online. My thoughts are that online bookstores are more about search and searching implies that you know what you are looking for.

Bookstores are going out of fashion in a bankruptcy kind of way. Is there value in a bookstore partnering with a ebook vendor, or all vendors, so that you can browse the shelves, find the book you want and then take it and the ebook reader to the front counter. The book is placed on your reader, the physical back on the shelf, the money then goes to the store, ebook vendor, publisher, author, etc

Would you buy a ebook reader if you knew that for each physical book you owned you could give it to your a library in need, preferably in a developing country where your language is spoken and the ebook company would give you an electronic copy of the same book?

It would be in the interest of the ebook vender because you become heavily invested in their platform and it would be in your interest because your books are now consolidated in your shiny new device.

I had an idea where I wanted to visualise and emphasise train routes over road routes on google maps. The best I could find online was a lot of static images with train lines drawn over the top. The value of this arrangement is for travelling and travel planning. Trains are an excellent mode of transport being more efficient than aeroplanes, provide access to amazing scenery and get you in contact with the people who live in the country you are travelling through.

So I built trainlines.heroku.com

It’s an open repository of train routes. I’ve got regional australia, new zealand and hong kong, malaysia, singapore and the philippines on there at the moment. Google clustering takes care of visualisations at zoom levels so any level of route (metro, regional, international) can be supported but I do have an emphasis on regional and international routes. If you want to add a train route go right ahead.

If you can think of a suggestion to make it easier to use, let me know and I’ll consider it. For the meantime it’s feature complete (minus a few known issues).

For the testers out there that I know, if you feel the urge to break it, please go to trainlines-preprod.heroku.com and do your worst.