Stray Hawkeye

If you’ve ever been in downtown Minneapolis, you’ve probably walked around in the Skyways.  And if you’ve walked around in the Skyways, you’ve probably gotten lost in the Skyways.  Each building built their own, with no central planning that I can discern.  If you look at a map of the Skyways, it basically looks like a two year old scribbled on a map of downtown with a crayon.  And the signs and maps in the Skyways are few and far between, and not all that helpful if you don’t know the official names of each building.  Aside from that, I would say more than half of the businesses and restaurants downtown are on the second level instead of the ground level.  So, I would like to see an app for phones that would help navigate the Skyways.  I was all gung-ho on making this myself a while ago, but as I’ve yet to get around to even starting it, I’m passing it on.  Some potential features:

• At the most basic, it would have a map of the Skyways, and a “You are here” dot showing where you are in them based on the gps in your phone.
• Ideally, it would have some sort of description of each Skyway and building’s interior, so if your phone doesn’t have gps you could figure out where you are based on what it looks like (super ideally, you could take a picture of the Skyway in front of you and it would show you where you are).
• Be able to find routes between places.  Include the times that each Skyway is open and find the shortest / fasted route between two points in the Skyway.  Be able to have some parameters like how far you’re willing to walk outside (maybe 5 blocks if it’s nice, 2 if it’s okay, none at all if it’s really cold – maybe even tie this to a weather service so it can decide this automatically).  If you’re going outside, it should show you pictures of where on which building you need to go back in to get to where you’re going.
• Tell you how long it will take to walk from here to there (in case you have a meeting in 10 minutes and need to grab lunch quick).
• Have the locations and, super ideally, menus, prices, specials, and hours of restaurants in the Skyways.  Do this with bars too.
• Have locations of businesses, both retail and corporate.
• Have things around getting to and from downtown.  Have location of parking ramps, their rates, average time they fill up, specials, etc.  Integrate it with the app they have for city buses.  Show bike racks.
• List upcoming events downtown at the Target Center, First Ave, Orchestra Hall, movies, etc.

A quick programming note – I know it’s not Friday, but I forgot to hit “Publish” on this one on Friday before I left for the weekend, and since I’m probably not going to do a Friday post over the holiday weekend, I’m splitting the difference and officially declaring it Free Idea Tuesday Evening, though I’m keeping the title the same, just because.  Also, I’m not numbering Free Idea Friday (for example, “Free Idea Friday 6 – A better video slider”) any more because: 1. I have a hard time keeping track of what number I’m on, and 3. I don’t think it adds anything to number them.  Cries of anguish over the change shall be heartily ignored.  Anyway, the post:

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This one is more of a request than an idea.  So, the problem I would like to see solved is to have a better time / location slider in media players.  Most media players have at least figured out that the slider that shows how far in to a movie you are should go across the bottom, and span the entire width of the video.  This in and of itself is a huge improvement over the ones that have a fixed width slider that doesn’t expand when you resize the player.  The problem is that on really long videos (a 2 hour movie for instance) it’s still very hard to do a fine grain adjustment with the existing sliders.  For instance, if you’re 1 hour 23 minutes and 8 seconds into the movie, it’s hard to go back to 1 hour 23 minutes and 4 seconds just to catch that last word again- a single pixel is already a few seconds long so it’s extremely hard to move the mouse a single pixel with any accuracy.  So, I would like to see some mechanism to use the mouse for both fine and course gain position adjustments in the same control.

The best idea I’ve come up with (and it could probably use improvement) is to make it so the area right around the current location in the clip is warped, so that if you adjust it just a pixel or two in one direction, that pixel is only worth a second or two, but if you move it 100 pixels, it’s worth far more than 100 seconds.  That would let you make fine grain adjustments more easily while still allowing large leaps in the same interface, and showing about where you are in the clip.  More of a logarithmic scale than a linear one (I think).  I’m not sure if setting it up this way would make it more or less intuitive.  I think the warping would also have to interplay a bit with how quickly you move the slider.

So, using VLC‘s slider for mock ups, the slider normally looks like this:

In my idea, when you click on the slider, it would bow out like this:

And if you move it just a little, it would only move the media a second or two, but quickly moving it past the bowed part would move it much further, at which point the new location would bow out.  To show the scale, if you added ticks, each showing an equal amount of time in the video/audio clip:

Or, to illustrate a little better, zoomed in, with 3 equal sections shown, with the assumption that each tick in the bowed section is one second, and outside the bowed section, each pixel is one second:

The length would still have to vary some depending on the length of the clip, or you could vary how large of an area is bowed out.  A little hard to explain clearly, but I think it would be fairly intuitive once you got it working.