RouteRanker

Product description

The core function of this app is to store, display, and share routes. There are also features designed to let the user compare routes and make informed decisions about them. If a user wishes to decide which route they should take to work in the morning, they can use our application to aggregate routes into groups and view group stats in order to decide which one is the quickest or most reliable. A user in a foreign city can use our app to review where they have been so far and rediscover important locations along the way. He can drop a pin to remind him where he parked his car, or where that restaurant was that he wanted to try for dinner. And by using Facebook for authentication, users can easily share selected routes with friends, letting them relive their experiences for themselves.

Tutorial

After logging into Route Ranker with your user credentials you will be brought to the home screen (below left). Here you can enter a name for your route, or leave the box blank and allow the route to be named automatically based on your current location and the date. After this feel free to play around with various levels of GPS accuracy (they can be changed mid-route if the user wishes to conserve battery life) and start tracking your route. By selecting the “Review” tab, the app switches to the map view (below right), where you can watch your progress as you move around and track your path. Note the “Routes” button on the title bar that brings you to a list of all the routes stored on your phone - routes you have made and routes that your friends have shared with you.

When you click “View Routes”, you are brought to the Routes page, where the routes stored locally on your phone (both your routes and your friends') are displayed in a table. You can click on any of the routes in the table to switch to a map view of the route. This way, you can review your path for previous routes, or see exactly where your friends went on their routes. Alternatively you can click the “Edit” button, which puts you into editing mode. This will allow you to click on a route and be taken to its edit screen. At the Edit screen, you can change and save the name of the route - you might want to do this, for example, if you forgot to enter a name when you made the route and want to change from the automatically generated title. The Edit screen also displays the start and end locations of the route. They are made using a Core Location geocoder which determines the nearest street address of the start and end points of your route. At any time in the Routes page you can swipe a table cell to the left to delete it from your phone.

Next, hit the “Compare” tab and you are brought to a list of your route groups (below left). The first cell of the table allows you to make your own group of routes. If you always commute to work in the same way, grouping these routes together will allow you to view aggregated data about your commute. For added convenience, routes that share the same name are grouped together; if you want to track all your morning runs, you only have to name each of them “Run,” and the app makes a similarly named group. After selecting either one or two groups, use the stats button to look at their information. If you are unhappy with the Routes that you have collected in a certain group, use the edit button to moves Routes in or out of a group (below right). To rename the group, tap on the right navigation button with the pencil in the top right of the screen.

For the stats feature, you have the option of looking at the stats for 1 group or comparing the stats for 2 groups:

Additionally, we have implemented the ability to change the units of the route analysis page. Click the ‘Settings’ button and you will be prompted whether you would like the information displayed in miles or kilometers.

The final tab (above left) offers you the ability to share your paths with your friends with the app. The app pulls your friends from Facebook and then filters out all of them that have not saved a path on RouteRanker. After selecting a friend, a user is brought to a list of his or her paths. Selecting a path and pressing the “Share” button gives the friend selected the option to download that path on to his or her phone. The “Get Paths” button brings the user to a list of paths that have been sent to him by his friends (above right). Downloading a path saves it to the user’s phone, or the user can choose to leave the path on the database to get another time. Once the route is downloaded from the server, it is saved on the user’s phone so that no matter what happens to the server or their friend’s phone, their copy stays intact.