Silver at the Best of Swiss Web Awards 2013 in the “Technology” category honoured the ambitious change in technology for our search platform, local.ch.  On 12.12.2012 at 12:12 p.m., our new search infrastructure was successfully launched after a 12 month renewal period. The new technology enables faster and better searches on local.ch, as well as quicker launches of new functions in the future. One of these innovations is the most comprehensive restaurant search in Switzerland. The restaurant guide www.local.ch/restaurant offers valuable information as well as the possibility to directly reserve a table at the selected restaurant.

fotografiert von Peter Neff

The aim of the major technology project “local.ch redeployed” was to create conditions ready for the demands of data quality and quantity in the future, design modular web applications and simplify the process of ‘deployment’. This goal has been achieved. The entire logistics for specific searches on local.ch has been renewed and the vast experience accumulated over the years on users’ searches on local.ch played a significant part in the changes. One of the major challenges of the project lay in implementing the changes without interrupting services: no downtime was allowed during the renewal period. We overcame the challenge and achieved 99.99% availability of the website even during renewal.

We weren’t alone in our celebrations: ​​our affiliated company home.ch brought home bronze in the “Mobile” category!

As we celebrate our first year with Ruby on Rails, we want to give a big thank-you to our technology partner, Simplificator. The team at Simplificator has been an integral part of our efforts in re-launching our website, developing our new restaurant guide, and breaking ground on exciting new projects (that we can’t wait to talk about soon).

Simplificator is a special company. In the Rails community, they have a reputation for getting things done in an agile way. But one of the things that amazed me the most was how well they integrated with our team: helping to improve our development process, championing best practices, and in general – simplifying everything we do.

Our team of engineers has grown a lot together, and we want to thank Simplificator for helping us get better at what we do. Here’s to all the pair programming sessions, refactoring support and big deployments we did together over the last year. We look forward to more of the same over the next year!

—

I’ll be giving a presentation about local.ch’s first year with Ruby on Rails will be given at Webmardi Lausanne on April 2, 2013. Our team is short-listed for a Best of Swiss Web award for 2013.

For quite some time now we support a custom URL scheme on our iOS app. If you’ve ever added or updated a contact from our app, you might have seen those strange URLs that begin with “localch:”. Tapping on one of those URLs launches the app, (hopefully) bringing you back to the original entry in our database.

We’ve extended the scheme to support integration with third party apps. If you’ve developed an app and want to give your users access to local businesses, places and people, here’s how you can do that with minimal coding effort.

Basically, you can launch a query on our iOS app with a URL such as this one:

localch://tel/q?0433220634

Similarly, the URL for the same query on our mobile website would be:

http://m.local.ch/q/0433220634.html

or equivalently:

http://mobile.local.ch/q/?what=0433220634

Of course, you can detect if our app is installed and conditionally open the appropriate URL with code such as this:

NSString *q = @"0433220634";
UIApplication *app = [UIApplication sharedApplication];
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:
	@"localch://tel/q?%@", q]];
if ([app canOpenURL:url]) {
  [app openURL:url];
} else {
  url = [NSURL URLWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:
  	@"http://m.local.ch/q/%@.html", q]];
  [app openURL:url];
}

Since early November 2012, our mobile website will attempt to launch our iOS app (if it’s installed) when it finds the “app” parameter. So a generic URL like this one

http://mobile.local.ch/q/?what=0433220634&app=1

will give you the best of both worlds.

Alternately, you could direct your users to download our app from the App Store:

} else {
  url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://appsto.re/swissphonebook"];
  [app openURL:url];
}

Search Extensions

Simple One-Field Search

This effectively deprecates the current search scheme, which should be supported for backward compatibility. Entries saved to the address book should include the new scheme.

localch://tel/search?q=0433220634&nearsearch=off

The optional nearsearch parameter explicitly turns proximity search on or off. The default behaviour is to use the app’s last setting.

Two-Field Search (“Advanced Search”)

localch://tel/search?what=Vikram&where=Zurich&type=res

The optional type parameter can be one of bus (business entries), res (private entries) or all.

Near Search

localch://tel/search?q=Pizza&origin=47.367754,8.545245&oname=Limmatquai

The optional oname parameter provides a label to display in the UI, e.g. “Pizza around Limmatquai”.

Browse Access

Activates our app in the Browse Access view, around given coordinates.

localch://tel/browse?origin=47.367754,8.545245&oname=Limmatquai

x-callback-url Support (coming soon)

See http://x-callback-url.com/specifications/ for specifications of the interapp communication protocol.

Any of the above URL schemes will support the x-callback-url semantics. For example:

localch://x-callback-url/search?q=Pizza&origin=47.367754,8.545245&oname=Limmatquai&x-source=ZVV&x-success=zvvfahrplan://fahrplan2.fahrplan.zvv.ch/bin/show.exe?

If appropriate to the action, the URL passed in the x-success parameter would be called back, potentially passing data in mutually agreed return parameters.

The x-source parameter could be used to display a back button in the UI, e.g. “Back to ZVV”, if appropriate.

We’d Love to Hear from You

If you’d like to integrate our app and have questions, suggestions or feedback, please drop us an email!

It was July 2006 when the very first version of local.ch mobile website was launched . Because download speed was important, the website was highly optimized to load fast and all unnecessary decorations were removed.

In the beginning of 2008, a second version emerged which kept the same goal of rendering fast on any mobile device plus small adjustments including integration with Google Maps. At that moment, the smartphone market was small but because the iPhone sold very well in Switzerland, we made sure we have an iPhone friendly UI.

Later on, our focus moved to the mobile native applications and the mobile website didn’t receive too much love with except of some server-side work, because after all, we, the engineers, love refactoring and migrations, isn’t it ? :) But our team is also data-driven; after learning that more than 90% of the traffic on the mobile website come from Android and iOS devices, we knew we need to work on the next, smartphone-friendly version.

The new version

How can I access it ? Simply point your iOS or Android device to m.local.ch and you are good to go ! If you want to test it from another device or even in a normal, big-fat browser, then use i.local.ch.

The owners of the old mobile phones can breathe normally now: their devices will be redirected to the old version that runs at mobile.tel.local.ch

Behind the scenes

The newest version is server-side code free which allowed us to develop and maintain a lightweight infrastructure to run the application. You guessed right, the language behind it’s the new(is really new ?) cool-kid-in-town, JavaScript, and we used Backbone.js as the mobile web framework. Big kudos goes to our friends from nelm.io who helped us in kicking-off the project and developed most parts of the prototype.

In this version we are “abusing” of HTML5 and CSS3 features in order to make sure you have a rich user experience when using our application. And we didn’t forget about loading speed, we use require.js to load and concatenate the JS files and we inline most of the images resources.

Feedback

Did I mention that we love feedback, especially the constructive one ? You can always contact the mobile team or just use the ‘Feedback’ button from the mobile website :)

Enjoy the new version !

Moritz published a post on our non-engineering blog with some more infos about this release.

09:30

Yannick Suter erklärt uns nochmals, um was es heute geht und wie der Tag ablaufen wird:

09:40

Philipp Keller stellt sein Projekt vor. Wir freuen uns auf einen heissen Sommer :)

10:30

11:30

Nico und Richard hatten gerade keine Zeit für mich und mussten schnell Weg. Ev. bekomme ich später mehr von den beiden.

12:30

Lunch Time! Dem Huhn geht es zwar auch nicht mehr so gut, aber zum Essen gingen die Teams dann doch raus an die Sonne.

14:45

Brain and Soul Food :)

15:00

Es wird auch gebastelt

Ventilatoren können einen rechten Krach machen… So wird der Sommer zwar kühler, aber nicht zwingend erträglicher.

Dabei sehen sie doch so harmlos aus…

15:30
Projekt “Gertrude” – noch sehr geheim und mysteriös aber immerhin darf ich dieses Foto schon mal veröffentlichen ;)

16:30
Auch das Mobile-Team beteiligt sich am Hackday. Wir sind gespannt, was am Schluss dabei raus kommt!

Falls ihr jetzt unsere App downloaden möchtet: http://info.local.ch/verzeichnisse/mobile Natürlich nicht nur für iPhone und Android sondern zum Beispiel auch für Nokia oder Blackberry.

17:30
Vorne wird noch immer hart am Projekt gearbeitet – es funktioniert noch nicht alles wie gewünscht. Im Hintergrund läuft bereits der Warm-Up für den Firmenlauf heute Abend.

Thats all for the moment! Die Teams werden nächste Woche ihre Resultate präsentieren.

Update 21:24
Es wird noch immer gehacked – allerdings mit EM und Bier als moralischer Support ;)

In der neuesten Version unserer App kann man jetzt auch Einträge favorisieren (hier gibts die Details dazu).

Wir haben das zum Anlass genommen, meine Ex-Kollegen von Blogwerk zu einer kleinen Challenge herauszufordern: Wenn der Eintrag von Blogwerk bis Montag, 20.2. um 13 Uhr mehr Favs hat als local.ch, geben wir Ihnen eine Flasche Schampus aus. Wir verdoppeln, wenn Blogwerk mehr als 15 Favs bekommt.
Momentan steht’s 12:12. Blogwerk ist minimal kleiner, ist also auf ein bisschen Support angewiesen.

Wenn ihr einen von beiden unterstützen möchtest, dann holt euch die letzte Version der App im Appstore, sucht nach Blogwerk oder local.ch und gebt Eurem Favoriten einen Stern.
Ob Blogwerk dann einen ausgibt, müsst ihr allerdings mit denen ausmachen…

This happens after almost 6 years of intensive work, hand in hand. We found a way to work together that worked out through all this time!

One can argue that we don’t measure the success of a partnership with its duration. But still, if it lasted that long, it’s because we were permanently sharing the same goals and we were forming one team.

We could tell a lot of very nice and great stories from these 6 years of joint work. We could even tell how it somehow influenced the life of some of the protagonists…

But, as Voltaire said: “Courtes lettres et longues amitiés”. So, let’s keep it short and try to convey the real emotion that it represents in some few words that summarize as well the ingredients of a successful partnership that we jointly learned to cook:

Trust; Respect; Openness; Transparency; Team, one team; Unique; Honesty; Reliability; Agile; Fairness; Culture; Mindset; Passion; Care; Common goals and Achievements; Dedication; Innovation; Collaborative; Celebrate, Apéro; Learn from each other; complementarity; People, people, people…

In many circumstances, I have been involved in initiating, cancelling, stopping or renewing a significant amount of business and technology partnerships. There are the ones I don’t remember. There are the ones with parties I simply called “suppliers”. There are the ones that became real partnerships. And there is the one – the unique one: Liip.

Imagine a website where problems meet their solutions, where you can forward a problem you are aware of and find people that are willing to get that problem solved – based on hacking or, to put it nicely, based on smarter ways to distribute information and gather data in new applications or web solution: That’s what RHOK is about and what local.ch proudly supports during this years Zurich event of the RHOK community. Here our engineer Ivan, member of RHOK, gives a short introduction to the event and examples of the solutions that were “hacked” into existence because people felt the need for them. Feel free to comment and take part.

“Random Hacks of Kindness is a global community of innovation that brings together subject matter experts with volunteer technologists to develop open technology solutions to the global challenges. More than 20 events are planned around the globe, including a local event in Zürich, hosted at the HUB Zürich on 3rd and 4th of December. The aim is to contribute to solutions to numerous problems societies worldwide are facing every day. It is, in short, about “hacking for a better world” – using smart ways of gathering and distributing data to solve issues e.g. related to nature catastrophies. Imagine for instance an earthquake – affected people need to know about water and food supply, medical staff needs to know about the location of wounded people. Bringing those who need information together with the needed information – that’s what we mean when we talk about “hacking for a better world”.

During past RHoK events around the world, volunteers have worked on applications that are already making an impact. Bushfire Connect, a crowd-sourced mapping tool to report bushfires, is being used by local communities across Australia. The Philadelphia Food Trust is promoting PhillySNAP, a mobile application connecting recipients of food stamps to sources of fresh produce. The World Bank is piloting CHASM, software for visualizing landslide risk, in the Caribbean. The Government of Colombia has adopted ATAOLI, a shelter management system built at RHoK Bogota, to manage millions of
people displaced annually by winter storms. Other apps have received support and interest from governments, NGOs and international organizations around the world.

Along with me, my local.ch colleague Dagmar has been an active participant during the current RHoK event in Basel. We helped Caritas Switzerland and Humanity Road to develop tools which will be used
worldwide in everyday activities of these important humanitarian organizations. If you find this interesting why not join us during the next RHoK event in Zürich? You don’t need to be an engineer to take part – everybody with basic problem solving or project management skills is welcome. It’s good to have more minds to think about one issue. So come along and see what we can do.”

For more details, see the Random Hacks of Kindness website at http://www.rhok.org and
official Zürich RHoK event page on http://www.rhok.org/event/zurich-switzerland.

Um den Hack Day bei Twitter zu verfolgen, folgt bitte @localch und nutzt den Hashtag #lhd11

19:32

Gut gegessen und ein, zwei Bier getrunken (ich glaube, es waren vier). Ich geh jetzt mal langsam nach Hause, morgen um 7.30 Uhr gehts schon wieder los für mich hier. Die anderen Hacker-Helden machen aber noch ein bisschen weiter. Ich hoffe, ihr hattet ein bisschen Spass mit dem Live-Blog, bis bald mal wieder:

18:55

ENDLICH ESSEN!! Vom Lieblingslibanesen natürlich:

18:49

Okay, Bier ist alle, also hacken wir noch ein bisschen weiter:

17:35

Endlich gabs ein paar Bier für uns. Völlig verdient:

16:48

Während die einen schon präsentieren, hacken die anderen noch (kenn ich noch aus der Schule, da hab ich die Hausaufgaben auch immer fertig gemacht, kurz bevor ich aufgerufen wurde):

16:32

Tristan, Toan, Harry und Benni haben sich was ganz kleines vorgenommen: “Können wir local.ch an nur einem Tag von Grund auf neu bauen?”
Und das geht tatsächlich. Zurecht lautete die Abschlussfrage: “Wenn wir das an einem Tag schaffen können, was können wir in einer Woche schaffen?”

16:14

Jetzt gehts los mit den Präsentationen. Jeder zeigt, woran er oder sie den Tag über gearbeitet hat:

16:00

Kein Bier vor vier. Jetzt ist’s vier. Also Bier:

15:52

Kleine Unterbrechung durch ein anderes Filmteam. Die Kollegen aus der Kommunikationsabteilung drehen ein paar Clips für die nächste local.ch-Party:

15:32

Man merkt, es geht langsam dem Ende entgegen, alle konzentrieren sich noch mal. Kurz nach 16 Uhr müssen alle Teams präsentieren woran sie gearbeitet haben.

15:22

Josua ist heute alleine unter Frauen und erzählt von einem mittelgeheimen Geheimprojekt:

14:40

Georg und Ivan hatten keine Lust auf ein Interview. War mir aber egal, hier muss jeder mal was sagen:

14:31

Now to something completly different. Juliane hat einen passenden Song zum Hack Day gefunden, der einiges über ihren Musikgeschmack aussagt:

14:28

Auch home.ch ist beim Hack Day dabei. Alain erzählt, wie er seinen ersten Hack Day bei local.ch erlebt:

14:03

Sebastian Vieria vom Mobile Team baut sich seine eigene Android Distribution auf einem Samsung Galaxy Nexus S:

13:48

Yannick Suter, der letztes Jahr aus einer XBOX Kinect und einem Fernseher einen “Minority Report”-artigen Infoscreen gebaut hat, macht diesen Infoscreen nochmal eine Nummer eleganter:

13:27

Nach dem Lunch noch ne schnelle Runde Töggeli, bevor es weiter geht:

12:25

Hugo, Thomas, Helge und Vikram diskutieren die wichtige Frage, wo man heute, denn Mittagessen gehen sollte.

12:16

Nach kleiner Arbeitspause wieder zurück, diesmal mit einem Interview mit Katja. Sie hat sich eigene Briefmarken designt und zeigt, dass man nicht Code schreiben muss, um beim Hack Day mitzumachen. (und sie benutzt den Begriff “Fränkler” für Franken, wofür sie eigentlich ausgeschafft gehört Peinlich, anscheinend benutzt man den Begriff “Fränkler” in Bern. Wieder was gelernt. Und “ausschaffen” will ich die super Kollegin Katja selbstverständlich auch nicht :-) )

10:47

Auch beim Hack Day muss man mal ernsthaft arbeiten, ich bin jetzt mal ne Stunde mit was anderem beschäftigt.

10:07

Yannick baut sich eine Suche für Skype-Nachrichten und expandiert seinen Körperumfang mit Milky Ways:

09:43

Den Anfang macht John Riordan vom Mobile Team. Sein Projekt ist etwas geheim, aber ein paar Dinge hat er mir doch erzählt:

09:34

Kaffee ist genug da, ich habs mir in der Küche bequem gemacht und mach mich mal an die Arbeit. Nicole und Muriel hatten die selbe Idee:

Yannick hat letztes Jahr schon erklärt, was ein Hack Day ist, hier zum Aufwärmen seine kurze Beschreibung: