Find all nearby canteens, favorite or not

[cyroxx]

I have the impression that the current use case of the app can be stated as: You have a certain set of so-called "favorite canteens" which you like and you choose between them according to their meals on a daily basis. So each day, you go to the canteen that offers the meal of your choice.

However, this doesn't help you to discover canteens in a yet unknown location. Imagine a student that has recently arrived and now wants to explore her surroundings for opportunities to fill her stomach. A different example is a student that studies in Potsdam, but has to visit once or twice a university library in Berlin for her research and is interested in nearby canteens where she can have good food at an affordable (student) price.

While this may seem as a duplicate of #13 at first glance, I would like to point out that the approach is somewhat different. While #13 aims at a location-based selection of favorite canteens, I propose to use the user's current location as one main entry point in order to navigate through the information openmensa.org provides, without being bound to the concept of maintaining one's favorite canteens.

Having said that, the concept of favorite canteens is still valid and very useful, e.g. you could have a widget that gives you a short overview of your (closest) favorite canteens at lunch time.

The question remains how those two usage patterns (well-known environment vs. unknown environment) ought to be combined.

• Do you use two distinct Launchers for the different aspects (like Facebook/Facebook Messenger, Öffi Verbindungen/Öffi Haltestellen)?
• Or: Do you switch explicitly between those two inside the app explicitly (e.g. button click)?
• In the unknown environment setting, how do you turn a canteen into a favorite after having been there?

[domoritz]

Even though this issue is not exactly issue #13, I still find them closely related. A user could temporarily add the canteen to his/her favourite canteens and remove them form the list if he/she is not happy with the canteen. I understand your concern that this is somewhat complicated. However, I want to avoid multiple views or even apps to help in the situation you described since it will not occur very often. What do you think about a smarter canteen spinner that shows more than just the favourite canteens? It could also display a link to edit the favourite canteens or contain a link to the closest canteen.

Now, the spinner gets somehow crowded. So, we should think about Sliding menus (http://android.cyrilmottier.com/?p=658). @cyroxx Does that seem like a reasonable approach?

[domoritz]

Here is a link where you can find more about sliding menus: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11377472/slide-out-menu-like-android-google-and-youtube-style-slide-menu-not-like-faceb

[cmur2]

Maybe it's a suprise for you but the early prototypes of my old & crappy OpenMensa app contained two equally weighted sections on it's start screen that showed your favorites first and below them all canteens found via geolocation (if enabled etc)...

[cyroxx]

@domoritz I get your point that you want to do one thing (maintaining your favorite canteens) and to do it right. I agree that if we incorporate too many different ideas on how the app should work, we will end up in a total mess.

You have to admit that the app is currently not location-aware at all. This results in issues like #4, which makes it especially hard the first time when you run the app. Given that we had a solution at hand like the one I proposed here, which is well-integrated in the apps workflow (or a a separate launcher, if we see that fit), we might improve the general user experience significantly. Not only could you easily search for your favorite canteens by distance and/or name and mark them as such efficiently (status quo: having the pain of finding their name in a long list), but you could also use the same view to explore your surroundings and thus combine those two worlds.

[domoritz]

@cyroxx I agree that one view to cover both use cases is the best solution. By adding a link to the canteen list view to the spinner in the action bar, this whole concept makes sense.

Oh, and I admit that the app is not location aware at the moment.

[l-jonas]

Closed by 33e5286