Hey all!<p>I'm an indie ios/web developer and I build Hewell (pronounced the same as Huell (and a reference maybe some of you old-school PBS viewers may get).<p>I've wanted an app like this for a long time, but most travel guide apps have really high production values and consequently low coverage. Lots of apps can give you a bespoke experience in San Francisco, but few work well everywhere (custom voice over is expensive). Hewell bypasses all of that by leveraging the power of WikiData and Siri.<p>Hewell was originally dreamt up by a myself and a few friends at a happy hour ~2016, but I'd never gotten around to actually building it until last year during lockdown--which honestly wasn't a great time to launch a travel app. Now that things are opening back up and people are traveling again, hopefully Hewell will be more useful.<p>I know I would have loved an app like this when I was in Japan a few years back. I knew there was so much history all around me, and I probably missed a lot of it. That said I've found Hewell useful even at home. There's a lot of hidden treasures in major cities.<p>In the future I'd like to add a "Tour Mode" that can guide you along a route or recommend places to go while you're driving or walking.<p>If you like the app, please consider donating. If the app makes enough money I'd like to donate a sizable chunk of the revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation since they make Hewell possible.<p>Links:<p>Announcement Blog Post:
<a href="https://brianschrader.com/archive/announcing-hewell-public-beta-/" rel="nofollow">https://brianschrader.com/archive/announcing-hewell-public-b...</a><p>My Apps:
<a href="https://skyrocket.software" rel="nofollow">https://skyrocket.software</a>
Hi there.
I installed this and here's some feedback:
I can't have any idea of the app because of my location. My experience can be summed up as: cold start.
Why are you limiting the user with GPS location? Maybe I want to get an idea about a place I dream of traveling.
Within: 15 km cannot satisfy this need.
Plus if you suggest me to try "More: Within 15 km", maybe you can show a single-tap button to do it? I feel it's tiring to read the small text, understand it, don't know it (since I didn't go to preferences screen yet) and there update and come back. Bad UX.<p>Congrats for the launch.
looks really promising. I usually hate apps and phones and and this is the first time in years I thought I have a reason to not "forget" my phone when I go out. can't wait until it hits android:<p><i>> The Hewell beta is for iOS users only.<p>> You must also have Testflight installed.<p>> This beta isn't accepting any new testers right now.</i>
For what it's worth, Wikipedia has a page that will actually show you articles nearby: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby</a><p>It's quite rudimentary and nowhere near as nice as this: just shows a simple, plain list. One nice thing is that it just resolves to coordinates, so if you happen to know coordinates of interest, you can just enter those: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/40.7128,-74.0060" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/40.7128,...</a>
This is really cool! I think this is a really under-serviced space and there's a lot of room for innovation here.<p>I started making <a href="https://waystops.com" rel="nofollow">https://waystops.com</a> a while back in a similar vein, although it's more aimed at higher-level exploration of destinations and places to visit than local things to do. I use the wikivoyage dataset to power a lot of it; you may want to check that out too as there is a lot of useful data in there.
I don't have an iPhone so I can't try it myself, but just in case you're not familiar with it yet (though I suspect you are), Wikivoyage is another Wikimedia project that could probably prove valuable: <a href="https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Main_Page</a>
Looks great, just tried it.<p>One feature that is missing: "reload map" or something. It's only showing things near my "real location"; but I'd also like to explore different locations (e.g. a city I'd like to visit next weekend).<p>For example "Komoot" is doing that really nice for hiking routes and similar activites: explore at my location, explore near a given location, use the map, ...
Hey, I like the premise of the app, but I face one major problem when using it (on an IPad 2019): once I have selected a place from the map view (so that I can review it, get the route etc.), it is not possible to go back to the map view. Am I missing something, or is this a bug?
This is nice. I used to work for Gogobot/trip.com back in the day and its great to see new players in the market. Any plans to incorporate user reviews to points of interest?
Great stuff! I also wanted an app like this, so I built <a href="https://app.mirrorspace.net" rel="nofollow">https://app.mirrorspace.net</a> - which looks pretty similar to yours albeit less polished.
I think there's a typo in the submitted URL, should be <a href="https://hewellapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hewellapp.com/</a>