The Incrementalist

Since I had the day off today, I had some time to tinker with my MBTA Google Maps experiment and fix a few things which had been bugging me. The changes include:

• You can now look for times near a particular address using the Location area under the map. In order to do this, I wrote a little proxy to feed addresses entered on this page to the wonderful geocoder.us free geocoding service, and return the results as JavaScript literals.
• The page now remembers your location, zoom level, and selected stop between visits.
• It now works in current versions of Internet Explorer.

At this point, it’s almost suitable for regular use. The biggest improvement that’s still on my list is to do a better job of handling stops that are too close together. Right now, stops can fall too close together on the map, making them difficult to click on individually. Automatically combining these stops would help the situation.