Hiking Database

[zourtney]

Make it happen.

Or not.

Let's discuss it here!


Carried over from the Hiking Database thread.

[Nick]

Should we merge the two threads?  We could just link to it to preserve history.

[zourtney]

Anything is fine with me. Pictures! Or it can't happen. (Or something like that.) Screen mock-ups are good.

It'd be kind of nice to have a more-official place for our projects. Maybe a randomland-proper page? I don't know...?

[Nick]

A RL-proper page (subject to dead linking and relocation at a further date.) or a wiki  page. I kinda like the forums for collaboration and sharing progress. Then perhaps use the other two to make more of a showcase for it. I don't know. I have sadly little experience with such things.

Maybe forum for Dev-discussion and then make a project-blog for development notes and milestones?

[zourtney]

I guess some of that depends on how totally we hose the Randomland. Do we have any other programming projects? It seems that most of them are dead except for Brad's latest game...which I still haven't seen.

I think we should open a remote git repo. Github, BitBucket, etc? Have a preference? I have a github account, but whatever. (If we host it remotely, it at least stands a chance of being seen!)

edit: I guess we do have at least one other project -- I'm going to port my mobile-formatted gas mileage spreadsheet UI thing over to using the latest Javascript APIs. And get rid of that clunky PHP server side component.

[Nick]

Oooo. Keep us updated on the spread sheet stuff.

I have no real experience with the repos. All I know is you have to pay for a private space, but that is not a real issue.

Also, remotely hosted content is available when my internet is down

[Brad]

Bitbucket has private repos for free, and mercurial is easier to get started with than git for Windows development.

[zourtney]

I got git and no Windows. So Mercurial sounds harder 

I wouldn't mind being familiar with it, of course. It certainly popular enough. My real problem with it is that I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce it. And any attempt to pronounce ends up with two accented syllables at the end of the word, which sounds somewhere between awkward and wrong.

BTW, I might be doing some Android stuff in a bit. A guy at work teaches a college class and is sharing the course materials with us. That and I broke my phone (see Hardware / Software section in 5, 4, 3, 2.....)

[zourtney]

ping! Anyone still interested in this?

I'm kind of thinking this project might be a good excuse to mess with the new Win8 APIs. If people are still interested, we should make a simple web server and define the data we want to store. Then have our UI(s) do all the heavy lifting. In theory, we could each attack different UIs simultaneously...once the back end code is solid.


As an aside, the terms "hiking" and "Florida" don't combine to make an idea. At least not in the classic sense. Because the hills are like twelve feet tall. But, the idea of cataloging parks, trails, etc is valid and still definitely interesting to me.

[Nick]

If we did it for phone 8 we wouldn't have much competition
Im still interested.

[zourtney]

Kinda my thinking too 

The nice part is that the server would be totally platform agnostic. Making the app for another platform would be as "easy" as rewriting it for the new OS.

Soooo....what kind of things do we need to collect? What kind of things do we want to provide?

a) location
b) rating
c) last visited
d) watch-out-for
e) difficulty
f) length
g) path type (foot, horse, bike, ATV, gravel, dirt, etc)

I need to find that old mock-up...and do some more!

Edit: maybe we can try doing the mockups together. Maybe this online tool or some others could do the trick?

[Brad]

We are going to create a shareable (dare I say social) hiking database right? In that cause we need to seperate out information based on whether it is user specific or not. For example a trail has a name, address, length, type, gps location, etc... all of which are not user specific. Things like the last time it you visited it, quality rating, difficulty rating, notes/comments, etc... are all user specific. When viewing a trail you should be able to see all of the non user specific info plus the average ratings, last time visited (by any user), and user comments. If necessary you could setup user roles to restrict editing of the non-user-specific data. Not sure how you'd setup the server to maintain these restrictions cross platform though.

I think we can start on a database diagram (uml or something) to flesh out all the necessary fields, along with creating some ui design stuff. Whatever tool is easy to use and share is fine with me.

[Nick]

It would also be good to let people share their stats without adding their username to the update (publicly anyway, the App maintainers would need records to stop spamming/griefing/idiots.

We could also include out own system for or support files from a GPS traks type program (Something that maps your path and keeps track of how quickly you moved from point to point and lets you mark points of interest(perhaps) So users could download other users public tracks to see where there are things to look at and get trails that might not be listed on the official maps.    ??

Share photos of the trail (kinda like Amazon user product images)?

Have a 'Looking for Hiking Buddy' system for users to find other hikers in their area?

List goes on, I am sure.

Edit!
Here is the old mockup
https://docs.google.com/a/randomland.net/drawings/d/1Fdw7oUCvI3KxKtfN338c-blx1jfMp_ExItjxn25mfNE/edit

[zourtney]

Sweet. Sounds like some good ideas. Nick's latter suggestions sound like a good "second phase", once we get things rolling and stable-ish.

Was that old mockup just made using [the software suite formerly known as] Google Docs? Let's just use that..!

[Nick]

Yup. That's what was used. Not to hard to work with for the purpose.