CarPark - Parking Made Dead Simple (on the iPhone) | Hacker News Reader

CarPark - Parking Made Dead Simple (on the iPhone)

gaiagps.com

I just used the old trick of taking a snapshot of the nearest intersection, and the view from there to my car.

Then, in the morning, I'd shake off my hangover, peel myself off whoever's couch I was on, and go forth in search of my mighty steed, trying not to vomit along the way.

Uphill both ways, of course.

I forgot to mention alcohol in the App Store text... probably should have :)

I jot the intersection street names (and whether I'm uphill or downhill—for some reason, this problem manifests itself most frequently when in SF) in a 99¢ Wal-Mart mini-composition notebook that sits in my pocket at all times.

> First and foremost, there is a large market for these kinds of apps on the App Store. When we started building this, 4 of the top 20 navigation apps were simple car parking apps.

In a closed market, customers find you by searching for what they need. If there are competitor applications, you can compete against them, not the 100k irrelevant apps that are not in that niche. If you have a good UI, that's a big separator between you and the pack. The Gaia GPS look always struck me as being a bit too gameish, sci-fi/hi-tech. This one is simpler and better but still a little unfriendly. I would prefer a simpler start screen (just parked car, find my parked car), rather than a map. I think the GaiaGPS team will learn a lot by refining this app to the mainstream.

Your comments are right on the mark regarding simplicity, and we have already learned a lot from working on this app (as well as a contract camera app we did recently).

We have a new version of Gaia we are pushing today that incorporates a lot of stuff - speeding up taking photos, nicer detail displays, more iphonic look, etc.

Your comment on Gaia is right too... the next version looks a lot more like CarPark, with the exception of the spacey first screen. In the next version of Gaia we are working on, we will also rip out the home screen and make it way more simple and less techie.

The only thing I disagree with is starting with two buttons on the home screen. All the other apps do that, but I think that in real-life usage, you want it to open up to where you were last on the map (which is usually where you last parked your car). The opening screen is just usually extra clicks.

There's a balance with iPhone apps (and probably all projects) with it being really obvious what to do the first time you launch it, and it being really fast to do what you want to do once you know how to use it. We're constantly debating along those lines when we add new features.

It takes fewer actions to park a car and return to it with CarPark! than it does with other parking apps. We'll see how people like that approach and refine it.

One thing I've always wanted to see in an app like this, is some indicator assuring me I won't get towed. In Chicago, this means identifying necessary permits, if any, and days of scheduled street cleaning.

I've known a few people that have gotten towed due to parking in a zone that was scheduled to be swept, and sometimes it's really hard to find a sign with this important information.

There is an online source for this info, so I think it'd be really cool to see it integrated into an app that highlights each street with a color based on how long you have before you need to move your car.

I have a buddy who has all the street cleaning data for SF. It's the result of a start-up that flamed out, and we were thinking about using this data somehow. They had to collect the data by hand, since the city stonewalled them.

Not to be a curmudgeon, but how is this any different from dropping a pin in the Maps app?

A couple main differences:

1) we'll give you guidance back to your car - Google will give you driving directions, but not like navigation through a parking lot.

2) You can add photos to the parking spots

3) You can dd notes to the parking spot.

It's certainly similar to dropping a pin, and as I said in my blog post, it's similar to what we do in Gaia GPS. However, it's built to be simple and useful for a single purpose, which is what a lot of successful iPhone apps are.

People love these car parking apps.

Why use that car icon instead of a push pin? It's harder to see.

Why include the accuracy as a number instead of a ring around the pin. Numbers require way more thought.

1) We should probably use the pushpin. We thought about switching at the last minute, but it was slightly harder than we thought, so we shipped it. We'll take care of this in the next release I'm thinking.

2) We do show the circular indicator around the Me-Marker as well... whether or not the numbers are good or necessary is probably a reasonable question.

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