ORider is a product that has sprouted from the The Great Byteball Bot War use-a-thon, originally named as "Carpooling for Byteballers". Since the rebranding of Byteball to Obyte it made sense to say good-bye to the old name and also to the @byteball.market account I used to post Byteball/Obyte related articles. In the future I will post from this account and will discontinue byteball.market.
The use-a-thon might have ended, but the development of ORider hasn't stopped. Several new features have been added mainly to improve usability.
- rebranding
- improved UI for checked-in and paid status feedback
- added ride auto-completion for driver
- added ride auto-completion for passengers
Rebranding
The ORider app got a fancy new logo, mainly inspired from the Obyte logo featuring a big circle which also resembles a steering wheel. The website moved to a new domain, you can access it now at https://orider.obyte.app, the old address under byteball.market is still live but will be taken down in the future.
Improved check-in and payment status indicator
In previous versions the check-in page was too big and barely fit in a mobile screen. The check-in QR code is the main focus of the screen and other details flow out of the visible area. For example, when a passenger checked-in and then paid for the ride it was printed out,but on mobile screen it wasn't visible. Also the control buttons to complete the ride become accessible only by scrolling to the bottom.
The new design gets rid of all text based feedback and introduces a progress bar integrated into the QR code area. The progress bar displays a blue bar to indicate the number of checked-in users and a green bar indicating the passengers who made a payment for the ride.
Ride auto-completion
One of the Obyte dev Telegram users, "fill" (xcopyz), asked to add auto completion for the rides by tracking the device location. It makes a lot of sense and reduces the risk of forgetting to complete a ride manually and accidentally not getting paid. Important to note, however, that both the driver and the passengers individually have to complete the ride because that is how they vote if they reached the drop-off location or not and so if the driver gets a payment or the passenger a refund. The auto-completion triggers from the driver's device since it is the driver's main interest to get paid and so who keeps the app running throughout the ride. The driver's location is constantly being tested against the drop-off location. Once the device is in a close proximity to the drop-off site, the auto-completion kicks in and completes the ride with the driver's current location.
Once the driver completed the ride, the passengers are given 5 minutes to either manually complete the ride by signalling their current location or accept they arrived to the destination and receive the same completion score as the driver:
Functional, but still beta
I encourage you to toy around with the app even though it is in early beta stage. You can set a ride fee as low as 5 kbyte, which is really just a fraction of a cent, to minimize the monetary damage if money got stuck in the contracts. There is still a lot to be done to make it smoother and more user friendly with more feedback and better UI design but the base concept has been implemented and functional.
See also my earlier articles about ORider: