Route Optimizer Tool

[enlightenedgamer]

Hi All,

I've been working on a new web tool and I'm looking for some feedback. I went and registered for some related (real estate) forums, but they're frowning on my attempts thus far since I'm a brand new user. That's why I'm returning to a forum where I at least have a little credibility.

Basically, I was looking at houses to rent/buy a while back. I had a list of addresses, but it was frustrating typing them into my GPS individually and then figuring out the best order to visit them. Without a GPS in my car, it would have been virtually impossible with just street addresses to go by.

To solve this problem, I wrote a tool powered by Google Maps. You enter your current location and a list of addresses, and it routes you from your current location to the addresses (in the best order), and then back again. You get a map and turn-by-turn directions.

I'd love some feedback on the tool in its prototype stage. I suppose you could use it to find the best route between video game stores (or anything else). Actually, this is the off-topic forum, so forget I said that.

LINK to prototype

 

[BlueLobstah]

I wrote a similar tool a few years ago (http://scurker.com/maps/) when I was doing yardsales around town. It's been a while since I've actually done anything with it, mostly out of laziness. Feel free to look at the source and see if anything inspires you, most of my logic is in tsp.js.

A couple of things I did notice when playing around with your page:

• There's no message when you reach the maximum number of addresses.
• If there's more than 9 addresses, they overflow the containing div (green).
• You have a lot of input fields for your waypoints. You can shorten this by by using confirm[] for each input, this will allow you to access it as an array in PHP.

Overall, looks like a good start.