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04/12/2014 11:06 PM Archiviato in:Announces
Why the only competitor of Taxi Professional may be Uber: an answer to a comment
03/31/2014 01:10 PM Archiviato in:Answers to comments
I 'spiritually' believe more in competition than in cartels. The Taxi Professional option is to allow taxi drivers to keep different applications on their devices without paying a dime for it nor leave their credit card or other. Then they might decide which one brings about more clients and possibly dump the rest.
In fact Taxi Professional is not a dumb client-service app like Uber and the nearly total number of other taxi reservations apps. In fact the client apps in the suite: In Arrivo HD, in Arrivo Express & Share & Spare offer much more than reserving taxis! In the last case it primarily offers the possibility of sharing walking, car and taxi trips with other users, in addition to reserving taxis; as for the other apps they are also routinely used in Rome and Milan - and progressively elsewhere when local transit companies offer the needed apis - for checking the waiting times for the buses and nearby stops, and to know how to reach a location by public service and much more, again in addition to reserving taxis.
My opinion is in fact that no dumb client-server app may beat Uber, and its big pockets, also holding the Google's money. Users do not simply open their apps without being remembered of doing it, and in fact Uber routinely appears in magazines, VIPs' reports and elsewhere!
As said Taxi Professional is different, because users would not need to start the app just to reserve a taxi.
Il 29/03/2014 19:59, Palm Beach Taxi ha scritto:
Hello!
GETRIDE has a new approach to the APP market.Instead of having an UBER corner drivers and worldwide dispatch they are working on a new model of partnering with all drivers from all cities (where UBER is only looking at big ticket markets and taking away individual company identity by in effect creating an omnipotent UBER FLEET.)
not good for anyone.
Just as GETRIDE has the vision to join small operators in all markets to provide great seamless service...maybe app providers in different markets can form a partnership as well.
No one can do it all. That's why partnering small companies and global regional app providers will win this horserace.
In fact Taxi Professional is not a dumb client-service app like Uber and the nearly total number of other taxi reservations apps. In fact the client apps in the suite: In Arrivo HD, in Arrivo Express & Share & Spare offer much more than reserving taxis! In the last case it primarily offers the possibility of sharing walking, car and taxi trips with other users, in addition to reserving taxis; as for the other apps they are also routinely used in Rome and Milan - and progressively elsewhere when local transit companies offer the needed apis - for checking the waiting times for the buses and nearby stops, and to know how to reach a location by public service and much more, again in addition to reserving taxis.
My opinion is in fact that no dumb client-server app may beat Uber, and its big pockets, also holding the Google's money. Users do not simply open their apps without being remembered of doing it, and in fact Uber routinely appears in magazines, VIPs' reports and elsewhere!
As said Taxi Professional is different, because users would not need to start the app just to reserve a taxi.
Il 29/03/2014 19:59, Palm Beach Taxi ha scritto:
Hello!
GETRIDE has a new approach to the APP market.Instead of having an UBER corner drivers and worldwide dispatch they are working on a new model of partnering with all drivers from all cities (where UBER is only looking at big ticket markets and taking away individual company identity by in effect creating an omnipotent UBER FLEET.)
not good for anyone.
Just as GETRIDE has the vision to join small operators in all markets to provide great seamless service...maybe app providers in different markets can form a partnership as well.
No one can do it all. That's why partnering small companies and global regional app providers will win this horserace.
Why In Arrivo will be faster
03/25/2014 07:53 PM Archiviato in:Information
Waiting for the release by Apple of the new version, I would like to talk a bit about the technologies that allows it to be much faster than the previous versions.
The first one, already introduced in the 7.0 version, takes advantage of the new apis provided by Agenzia Roma Servizi per la Mobilità to offer waiting time and transit routes without the need to download and scrape complex html pages as done previously both by In Arrivo and the competing apps. In order to do it a set of Python scripts have been developed according to the suggestions by the provider to offer services to the legacy PHP scripts exporting the information to the apps.
The latter breakthrough was due to the introduction on the part of Apple of a new MKDirection library. This allows to find path directly from inside the app without the need of contacting the Google services by means of remote scripts. This allows a much quicker feedback and freedom for possible limitations on the part of Google.
Finally this result was attained by means of a twist. Basically Apple has silently introduced CALayers in its views and executes a callback to layoutSublayersOfLayer on specific views like the stops. Strangely this call happens even when executing the code on a iOS 6.1 device while the function in the MKAnnotationView is missing with the result the app crashes. The solution was to conditionally provide that in the case of iOS 6.1 does nothing but at least does not crash the app.
Unfortunately the previous technology is not available for iOS 6.1 and no backward compatibility is foreseen. Consequently paths no longer appear on older devices without anyway impairing in any way the correct working of the app.
New Apis
The first one, already introduced in the 7.0 version, takes advantage of the new apis provided by Agenzia Roma Servizi per la Mobilità to offer waiting time and transit routes without the need to download and scrape complex html pages as done previously both by In Arrivo and the competing apps. In order to do it a set of Python scripts have been developed according to the suggestions by the provider to offer services to the legacy PHP scripts exporting the information to the apps.
Apple turn-by-turn
The latter breakthrough was due to the introduction on the part of Apple of a new MKDirection library. This allows to find path directly from inside the app without the need of contacting the Google services by means of remote scripts. This allows a much quicker feedback and freedom for possible limitations on the part of Google.
IOS 6.1 support
Finally this result was attained by means of a twist. Basically Apple has silently introduced CALayers in its views and executes a callback to layoutSublayersOfLayer on specific views like the stops. Strangely this call happens even when executing the code on a iOS 6.1 device while the function in the MKAnnotationView is missing with the result the app crashes. The solution was to conditionally provide that in the case of iOS 6.1 does nothing but at least does not crash the app.
Unfortunately the previous technology is not available for iOS 6.1 and no backward compatibility is foreseen. Consequently paths no longer appear on older devices without anyway impairing in any way the correct working of the app.
New 7.3 update
03/25/2014 08:10 AM Archiviato in:New releases
I have the pleasure of informing the users and appreciators of the in Arrivo HD app that the new 7.3 version has been submitted to Apple for approval with a particularly wide number of improvements: this is the official change log:
- The app is more responsive even in areas with many stops on older devices.
- The metro stations with more lines correctly show the different timetables by swiping.
- Upon booking a taxi, is now possible to inform the driver beforehand about the expected destination and to share the path with other users to look for company.
- The route to the destination of a taxi ride is now drawn on the user's map upon boarding the taxi to keep her posted on possible departures from the planned route and be thereafter able to ask the driver for clarifications.
- The app does not crash any longer by rating it from the waiting times table.
- The paths are now calculated by means of the new Apple turn-by-turn library instead of the google ones for a better resilience and efficiency.
- By selecting a stop from the nearest stops table, the path to reach it is shown on the map.
- Fixed a bug that locked the app when starting it from afresh with a busy cache.
- The app does not crash any longer on system 6.1.
Path calculation performed from inside the app
03/17/2014 10:44 PM Archiviato in:Announces
The new important 7.3 version of In Arrivo HD shall calculate route directly from inside the app thanks to the new Apple library so eschewing the need to resort to their party entities for the benefit of resilience and efficiency. This together with a host of improvements and new feature packet in a soon to be released version.
Google got nasty with developers
03/15/2014 09:21 AM Archiviato in:Information
We have to report Google got apparently nasty with users taking advantage of their geocoding services. Consequently most path drawings in the apps got affected. We are moving the support to Bing and, where possible, get the information from the new bus information back office to try and ease the problem.
