Show HN: MealDB – The best restaurants and cafes nearby

by jfoster • 11 years ago

17 16 11 years ago

skidoo• 11 years ago

....for me to get a side job at? Because I have no disposable income beyond keeping myself alive. So, great time spent on that app, comrade.

jfoster6• 11 years ago

I'm sorry to hear that. Not sure about what your circumstances are, but maybe you could post an Ask HN so that someone might be able to help?

From what I've seen, the HN community is incredibly generous when it comes to giving people opportunities.

bliti• 11 years ago

What did you use to build it?

jfoster6• 11 years ago

It uses Bootstrap, Angular, Google Places API, hosted on App Engine (Python backend).

Funny story about how it came about, actually. I built a really crude version of it last year the night before flying to Hong Kong for a holiday. I realised I hadn't done any research about good places to eat in HK, so I stayed up all night trying to get something functional up in time, figuring that I would sleep on the plane. That was a really bad idea, because it turned out that I could barely manage to get any sleep on the plane.

I've been making it a bit more usable over the past week or two, showed it to my friends on facebook over the weekend, and decided it's ready to be shown a bit more widely.

vortico• 11 years ago

Looks pretty good! I'd recommend using a Facebook icon instead of a "thumbs up" icon, since nobody likes clicking like buttons if they can avoid it.

jfoster6• 11 years ago

Yeah, good point. I did some user testing on this (with peek.usertesting.com) before showing it to anyone, and that exact thing came up a couple of times in the videos.

sdrothrock2• 11 years ago

What does it use for the ratings/restaurant data?

I'm in a part of Tokyo with tons of restaurants and was disappointed to see that it brought up a bakery and a pop idol cafe for my first and second hits -- not only are they not especially good for meals, they're both pretty far from me.

jfoster6• 11 years ago

It uses Google's ratings data. The same ratings you would see in Google Maps, but unlike Google Maps, it sorts the results by rating.

You can change the radius through the location menu. I did initially have the default radius as something smaller, but that didn't work so well outside of city centers. I'll be making an update so that (when not explicitly specified) the radius will be increased/decreased based on volume & quality of results.

I'm okay with it showing places that are not perfect for meals. If there's an exceptional bakery nearby, I think that warrants it being listed. I like to use the "image" button for this; I find that it gives a really good feel for what to expect from a place.

sdrothrock2• 11 years ago

I actually went back to look again after you mentioned the radius and noticed that the site tags my number one hit as a bakery when it's actually a store that just sells snacks. (Think mini bags of potato chips, candy, etc. Grocery store stuff.)

I guess the problem with this area in particular is that the people who rate things on Google tend to be tourists and not people who live/work here, so the ratings tend to skew high on tourist attractions rather than places that are actually good to eat at.

(If you were curious, the second result was the AKB48 cafe in Akihabara.)

Design-wise, I never would have thought to look for a radius setting under the location menu. Playing with it didn't help much; I think it's just a problem with people in Japan not rating things on Google. Oh, well!

helb• 11 years ago

In my location, there's a beer pub with no meals at the third place and a whorehouse on the 4th. Maybe it would be useful – and probably easy – to at least enable filtering by these tags ("restaurant", "bar" etc.) on the right.

crimsonalucard• 11 years ago

It's like yelp. But very very minimal.

jfoster6• 11 years ago

It's intended to be something you might use on your phone to make a quick decision about where to eat in a place that you're not familiar with, so I think of minimalism as a feature for this type of app.

speyburn• 11 years ago

Just a ux tip i noticed: popping up the location api window asking for a permission without an user action is (atleast by some people) considered a bad user experience.

Maybe have a big button (or similar) on the landing page that says "Find out delicious food" or something more describing. Clicking that button would then launch the location api permission dialog :)

jfoster6• 11 years ago

Thanks for the tip. I agree that it's a bit abrupt. Will experiment with something like what you're suggesting.

softdev12• 11 years ago

This looks nice. I'd definitely recommend porting it to an app. It seems straightforward enough to implement. Good job.

mrozel• 11 years ago

It looks better than I think you originally gave yourself credit for.. I'm probably going to try to use this.

Show HN: MealDB – The best restaurants and cafes nearby

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