Setout Live: answering the question that comes before navigation.

Where it stands

In testing. iPhone and Android releases are planned.

The problem

A weather app reports conditions where you are. A navigation app reports traffic as it is now. Neither tells you what you will actually drive through, because by the time you reach a stretch of road the rain, the traffic and the light have all moved.

So the everyday question goes unanswered: leave now, or in twenty minutes?

The solution

Setout plays the drive forward in time. For each possible departure it works out where the car will be at every future minute, then looks up the conditions at that place and that moment.

The options are laid out side by side: minutes of rain, minutes after dark, traffic delay, arrival time. Setout suggests one. The driver decides.

Setout does not navigate. Once the driver has chosen when to leave, it hands off to whichever maps app they already use.

What we built

• A mobile app for iPhone and Android, built from one codebase
• A web version that plans a drive without an account
• A hosted service that combines routing, traffic, weather radar and the position of the sun
• Plan: compare departure times for a single drive
• Meet: find a meeting point that is fair by travel time, and see when each person should leave
• Monitor: watch regular drives and alert only when weather or traffic is worth knowing about
• Radar: the last hour of rain radar, animated

What this shows

Setout brings several live data sources onto one clock and turns them into a single plain answer. The engineering is in making that fast, accurate and honest about what it cannot know.

The same work applies to business software: several systems, each holding part of the picture, combined into something a person can act on.

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