Show HN: Ambulate – Detailed Trip Planning

70 points · _phnd_ · 12 hours ago

Ambulate was created because planning hiking trips using spreadsheets and various map solutions got chaotic. I wanted an app to manage and map multi day trip itineraries in the outdoors/backcountry.

Features - Manage itineraries - Add activities and map markers - Add routes (upload GPX or plot by hand on map) - Desktop and mobile

It is free to try (login using Google or create a user). Alternatively the slides on the home page give an idea of the UI.

I'll appreciate any thoughts and feedback you care to share:)

33 comments

jll29 · 4 hours ago

If anyone needs a good (related) startup idea, here's one for free:

Complex trip planning for professionals, but in a different way from Ambulate - not hiking trips, but transactions across Web sites: I really hate the way how today you cannot "properly" book a flight, hotel, train like you would do it in a SQL transaction

  BEGIN TRANSACTION
    book train
    book flight
    book hotel
  COMMIT;

Only if all three are available and execute the reservation without error do I also want to execute the other ones; that's a prime use case for DB-like transactions, but across Websites. Because no point getting only the flight if I have no-where to stay etc.

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n4r9 · 10 hours ago

I love this idea. It's simple, effective, and the UI is great. The account creation process is such a relief. Editing and saving trips is delightfully fast. A few suggestions:

* When adding an activity (or route), I instinctively look for a button at the buttom that says "Save activity". And possibly one that says "Cancel". Right now it's immediately saved and appears on the itinerary. That might be faster, but it leaves me feeling anxious about state.

* The ability to share a Trip with others and even to allow collaboration would be a game-changer. Might require you to allow people to view/create/edit Trips with a "guest" account.

* It would be amazing if there was a way to automatically generate driving or public transport directions and have the Activity and Route both added into the itinerary.

manav · 2 hours ago

I get that ambulate just means to walk around but it gives the sense to something medical (as an American).

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almog · 2 hours ago

I'll start with the least important detail but the first one I noticed: the main page features an example image that shows mountains scenery that could have been the foothill of the divide from the south west (based on the combination of the vegetation and peaks), however, the trip planning details are for somewhere in Norway which was very confusing until I checked and saw it was an AI generated image.

But to the more important stuff: the main tools I've been using for trail/route planning (for over 6K miles) are Gaia and CalTopo. These tools have a lot of route building tools and overlays for both planning and navigation and I guess you don't want to replace these tools and if you acknowledge hikers are using these tools already and see a way to complement them somehow, I think you want to let the user directly reference their tracks/routes from within Ambulate as it's unlikely they'd like to replicate their work in another tool.

1986 · 10 hours ago

Just a quick note on your landing page on mobile, if you add the following CSS to the slides img element it'll look a lot better across viewports:

    max-width: 100%;
    object-fit: contain;

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