This week I spent a lot of time working on the new user interface. Along the way I also implemented a bunch of small things. For instance, errors are now being collected and reported – that’s important because if I don’t know that errors are happening I can’t fix them.
As I’m getting closer to something that can actually be used it’s becoming clearer what’s missing. A big missing piece is that currently you can’t search for anything, you can only see nearby stops. I haven’t spent any time on text search so far but over the last week I started thinking about how I would implement that.
It’s still something I’m thinking about but there are some elements that I know I’d like my solution to include. For instance, if you can write the same letter in more than one way – for instance æ/ae or å/aa – you should be able to use either and get a sensible response. Similarly, if you make common misspellings – like using f instead of ff or vice versa – that’s okay, you should get a sensible response as well. And finally, whether you use an abbreviation or write out a word fully – skt/sankt, st/station, etc – shouldn’t make a difference.
Both google and rejseplanen are good at handling different ways of writing the same letter and typos but they’re both struggling with abbreviations. Google has no idea that st and station are the same and rejseplanen thinks it makes a big difference whether you abbreviate sankt. I’d like that to work more smoothly in my implementation.
This week I’ll keep fixing errors and finishing the new user interface and hopefully I’ll have some time to start implementing text search.
