Brief

Christian Siegrist my co-worker on the Candeo project and I got contacted by Anne, Niels and Moritz three Architecture Master Students at the ETH, Zurich. After finding the documentation of our bachelor’s project Candeo they recognized the similarity of Candeo and what they had in mind for their free semester project. The plan was to build an application where the user could enter his preferences for his living situation and the app should tell him which places in Zurich would be great matches for him to live. Christian and I saw the potential of this app for flat-searchers as the main customers but also urban designers who can use the gathered data to plan next steps in the evolution of a city.

Prototype

In the initial phase we would build a prototype without the data handling in a dynamic way. We only had time and budget for 5 days to work on it thus we needed clever solutions to the big problems (mostly performance requirements) we would face. We built the map interface with the extraordinary clever ModestMaps library from Stamen. We’ve missed this one for our bachelor’s project and thought we’d give it a shot. ModestMaps allows you to easily use several map data providers like Google, Yahoo or the OpenStreet Project. ModestMaps worked like a charm beside we could’t share the libs over GITHub.com, see the getSatisfaction thread for detailed information.

Interface

The user would insert his data with ten vertical aligned sliders. These sliders are customizable in horizontal and vertical manner so the user could customize the attributes of each parameter on the same interface element. This way we were able to reduce the complexity of the UI and leave more space for the map. Each parameter had it’s representation on te map. These were semi-transparent layers rendering from red to black. Red are the most accurate regions for the user to live in and black are the regions that don’t match his preferences at all.

Conclusion

The presentation of this project to the professors at the ETH were a big succes and we’ll get support to work on this project during 2009. We’ve fixed a release date around summer ’09. There will be major changes for both the interface and the map as well, but we were able to build a solid foundation for the next steps in the process.