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Just Landed for iPhone helps you pick someone up from the airport. (getjustlanded.com)

88 points by jgrall ↗ HN
Just Landed is a new iPhone app that makes it easy to pick someone up at the airport on time - just enter their flight number and we'll alert you when you need to leave for the airport. We take into consideration your location, current traffic conditions, and real-time flight data to remind you to leave at just the right time.

87 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] thread
ChuckMcM
Cool, now if it could do a lattitude like thing and let you know where on the sidewalk they were, that would be epic.
jgrall
Yeah totally, we were thinking of setting up a geo fence around the airport and automatically sending a text with their location or notifying the person being picked up that their ride has arrived.
ChuckMcM
That would be pure awesomeness.
nsxwolf
This would be awesome. Does iOS let you do trigger this event if the app is in the background?
jgrall
Yes it does with the newer iOS APIs for significant location change monitoring and geofencing.
rogerbinns
You should also check out Glympse which is what I use for this kind of thing. It is sufficiently real time and accurate that the people I'm picking up surprise me at my car as I park. It also helps when you get unexpectedly delayed by traffic.
r00fus
Geo-fencing (at least on my 4S using location-based reminders a la Siri) was an intense battery drain. As cool as it is, I don't use it often for that reason.

Not sure if things have changed since launch, but keep that in mind - if you do implement, maybe make it easy to turn it on/off?

dwynings
I'm not a fan of the music playing automatically. The app looks great though!
jgrall
Hopefully the mellow Garage Band loop on the website wasn't too offensive ;)
dwynings
Not offensive, but annoying when you have multiple tabs open and you don't know which one the music is coming from ;)
jaredsohn
I hope it isn't inappropriate to post this here: I've built a Chrome extension that could help you find it. http://www.mutetab.com/

Unfortunately, the current version requires that you have the extension prior to opening the tab that plays sound. (But it is fixed in my developer builds and will be available in the next version.)

netfire
I had the same problem. I opened up multiple stories from Hacker News and had to click through each of the tabs find out where the music was coming from. Perhaps you could use some sort of javascript mouse event to detect actual user interaction with the opened tab before you start playing the music loop, and yes please make it clearer in your UI on how I can make it stop.

Overall, pretty cool concept/app.

luchak
No, but your page still makes me play "hunt the noisy tab", and then, if I decide I want to watch the video, requires me to pause my own music to listen to your loop.

I don't object to all audio. Click-to-play and relevant? Great! But auto-playing, un-mutable, and completely unrelated is a terrible combination.

freshfey
It looks beautiful, congratulations. Which airports do you monitor? I couldn't see that on first sight.
jgrall
All US airports. It works internationally too (I recently tested it in Turkey) but we aren't advertising international airport support because our international data is incomplete. If there's enough demand we'll add global airport support in the future.
duiker101
automatic music, no stop or volume button immediatly in line of sight, closed. I am sorry from that glance i gave it looked good but the music totally killed it for me.
partlysean
Valid points. FWIW, you can click anywhere on the iPhone to pause the video (and music, for that matter). We should probably make this clearer.
ghurlman
You should probably not automatically play audio. Or, if you must have audio, don't automatically play the video.
darushimo
I'd suggest never automatically playing music. I always imagine the user just watched a youtube video with really low volume.
mikeash
I don't want a clearer way to stop the audio, I want it to not start unless I ask for it. I honestly can't see any reason to have auto-playing audio on a web page unless that's the entire purpose of the page (audio or video player) or you're purposefully annoying people.
ebzlo
I don't know if there's speech (my audio is off), but I understood exactly what it did without audio.
dmoy
cannot upvote this hard enough

Opened a bunch of links on a slow connection, suddenly some moments later one is playing audio! Even with javascript disabled :(

Does anyone remember that chrome extension that found which tab out of 100 is playing audio? Was it MuteTab?

dmoy
It was MuteTab :)
partlysean
Okay, we hear ya. Pushing an update of the video sans music in a little bit.
heliostatic
Thanks for the fix. It was very surprising at work, and equally surprising, but pleasant, to hear silence at home.
PhrosTT
How did you make that awesome demo? Is that just js + 100 hours of labor or what?
amccloud
It's just few images sliding. The iphone is a video.
PhrosTT
I'm so used to right clicking and looking for Flash as the only indicator of video.

/forgets video tag.

partlysean
Glad you like it!

To record the footage, I used the app Reflection (reflectionapp.com) to AirPlay my iPhone's screen to my MacBook Pro.

Everything was edited using Final Cut Pro X. The trickiest part was the status bar. When you AirPlay an iOS device, the status bar changes to a blue color, and I just wouldn't have it. I made a custom black status bar in Photoshop and keyframed the crap out of it to cover the blue one.

Then I exported the video from FCPX, compressed and converted it with Handbrake (handbrake.fr), and embedded it into the webpage using the HTML5 <video> tag.

Originally, the iPhone image I used on the homepage was angled rather than head-on. Using some clever CSS transforms, I skewed the video to fit perfectly in the angled iPhone. Unfortunately, transforming the video left us with poor aliasing and we opted for the head-on approach to keep the quality high.

If there's anything else you'd like to know, feel free to ask!

casca
This could be very useful, but it doesn't install on a 3GS because it requires a gyroscope? Seems a curious requirement given the functionality.
jgrall
We didn't support 3GS because creating 2X the artwork would have been a lot of work for a relatively small % of iPhone users that will soon be upgrading to retina. Consider your comment a +1 for 3GS.
shaggyfrog
I also have a 3GS and I find this response a little baffling. It can't be that much work for you to produce non-retina artwork, can it?
jgrall
Well we didn't want to do a simple scale-down, so some assets would have to be touched up, and other stuff would need to be remade. We're a small team so we did a cost/benefit and decided to focus on iPhone 4 and above.
10dpd
iOS app dev these days is all about increasing what I like to term the ARPH (average revenue per hour), a function of the revenue generated per hour spent working on the app. The best strategy IMHO is to get something out there ASAP, validate the market, and then expand if the data suggests a viable product that people will pay for.
jgrall
Our thoughts exactly.
moron
Yeah, it's just a button, right?
shawnc
It's not hard at all really, I've done it a few times. Since they've already designed for the Retina, shrinking to the 'old' display is peanuts.
auston
I would also like 3GS support...
jgrall
We're going to add 3GS support :)
pwenzel
Please consider me a +1 for 3GS. Looks like a beautiful application.
antr
it doesn't work with the iPad (3) either...
jgrall
Yeah no iPad support yet. For this app to work though you kind of need to have the device with you at all times to not miss the reminders to leave for the airport. For that reason, we thought iPhone was the way to go.
antr
albeit the iPad is not the most "mobile" device, it still is pretty portable, and used by many travel professionals (not the traveler per se).

still, looking forward iPad support going forward.

tomkarlo
Also, there are a significant number of people out there with an Android phone plus an iPad.
[deleted]
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dannyr
Doesn't work for the latest iPod Touch too.
[dead] jgrall
We're going to add 3GS support :)
Garwor
Looks great; downloaded it to give it a try.

This app is a great concept, but it's going to be interesting to see whether I'll let myself trust it enough to be useful. If I end up double-checking behind it anyway, then there's no point.

jgrall
Totally understand. If it's any comfort we put a lot of effort into making it reliable, including fallback services for push notifications and route information in case our data providers go down. We also play it safe and get you there with a little time to spare. Hopefully we'll win your trust after a few successful pickups.
shaggyfrog
Since the video can take a while to load, you should have something other than a black screen for the iPhone image (perhaps even "Loading Video..."), so it doesn't look like your app is... nothing :)
jgrall
I think there is a placeholder image but not all browsers handle the <video> tag the same way. Good point though.
arpit
This is pretty cool. Are you using the data apis from FlightWise or FlightTest or something you built yourself?
jgrall
We're using FlightAware's Flight XML api, among other data sources. Their API is pretty decent and their data is complete for US inbound/outbound and domestic flights. They are also really responsive on the forums to questions and feature requests. See here: http://flightaware.com/commercial/flightxml/
zenocon
fyi: got prompted with DivX plugin wants to run -- big black video box skewed off to the side of the phone looking out of place...clicked to allow it to run, chrome becomes unresponsive and crashes.

granted that may be the divx plugin problem, but it seems easier to host the video in something like youtube or vimeo and embed it if you must use video.

gbeer
Thanks for the feedback! I have similar errors with divx in Chrome, my bet is on divx being finnicky :D
rwhitman
Same here. I don't understand why anyone would use a video player other than youtube or vimeo for this type of thing
jurre
Looks great, I can't seem to get it in my country though (I guess apple thinks I live in the Netherlands), is this US only?
jgrall
Yeah I should have clarified, it's in the US app store only for now. Licensing all the international data is quite a bit more expensive, so we wanted to test demand before doing that. We'll also translate the app in the future.
nsxwolf
Well your app is so popular you just blew your quota!!
jgrall
Thanks for the heads up.
jgrall
Lol yeah, we blew our bandwidth quota :) Service restored.
mahyarm
Could you enable this for all appstores? I sent a link to a family member in canada and he couldn't download it.

Generalizing this into a flight tracker while your travelling app would be pretty awesome too. You can swipe between flights like kayak's flight tracker.

Who did you use for the graphic design? Did you contract it out or are you working together?

jgrall
We'll support other countries in the future once we've licensed the necessary international data to get good coverage in other countries. Sorry your family member wasn't able to grab it.

We've thought about other ways to build on the app... like tackling leaving for the airport to catch a flight. We might add multi-flight tracking too with swiping between flights as you suggest in the future if enough people want that.

The graphic design was done by my buddies Graham Beer (@grahambeer) and Sean Nelson (@partlysean).

onlyup
Looks great but I am outside the US and use Android.
jgrall
Yeah I'm afraid you'll be waiting for a little while. We will do international soon tho and Android if there is enough demand.
nsxwolf
I love that flying animation with the parallax clouds.
jgrall
That's @partlysean handiwork.
hiraki9
I just downloaded the app, and the designer made excellent design choices. There's an elegant balance of playfulness and utility, tasteful color scheme and font choices and a healthy amount of animated sizzle. Well done!
jgrall
Props to @grahambeer he was responsible for much of the app design.
gbeer
Thanks for the kind words, very much appreciated!
tomkarlo
This is great - there have been a lot of times over the past few years I wish I had this app. One suggestion - is the travel time to the airport static or variable based on traffic? Here in SF, it can vary by a factor of 2X-3X, turning a 20 minute drive into an hour. You could get traffic data from Google or somewhere and cover that (if you don't.)
felideon
I would also like to know how well this would work with international flights, when picking up non-US citizens. I presume there's no way to know this, so one should still have to ballpark 30-60min buffer time for immigration.
godisdad
Your website is profoundly slick and aesthetically appealing.
RobMcCullough
I love the idea and the design work! When I was younger, my father would pay me the equivalent of a taxi to get him to and from the airport. Driving slow laps around the SFO terminal, wondering if the plane is even on the ground yet, was definitely a big problem.
jgrall
Glad to hear we found a problem that matters to you :)
pivo
I assume that you try to limit the number of queries to FlightAware in order to save yourselves money. So I wonder how many you make for a given flight. Obviously you make one when the user enters the flight number, but what about after that?

What if the plane has to circle? Would you be able to tell the user that the flight hadn't landed or is the landing time based solely on the initial FlightAware query?

jgrall
We know about updates to the flight if it gets delayed and has to circle, and yes we do additional queries to FlightAware on the user's behalf even if the app is closed. We spent a lot of time getting this right, as well as building a good caching system to improve performance and save money. Incoming flight alerts (delays, cancellations etc.) invalidate the cache for the affected flights.
psadauskas
I tried adding my flight for tomorrow, Frontier 662 "F9 662", and I can't find any combination that lets it find that flight. Is the "9" in the airline abbreviation messing it up?
jgrall
We just added support for 1000 additional airline codes. Some of the two digits codes were not supported by our data provider because they conflict with airlines in other countries. Anyway this is resolved now, you should be able to find Frontier flights.
willfarrell
Looks awesome, but not available to Canadians. Why does this keep happening?
daemon13
/Get the App/ button is a bit confusing.

I wanted to look at the app in the AppStore, and pressed the button, but :-) no iTunes on my Ubuntu...

Also, the app is not available in other countries except US.

I would suggest - may be have two buttons?

Button 1 (BIG) - Download/Purchase/Get the App

... for those who want to purchase

Button 2 (smaller) - see in AppStore

... for those who want to check or save link to app in AppStore

P.S.: i personally dont like Get