Transit Appliance App Takes Grand Prize!


This evening a Transit Appliance application was awarded the Grand Prize in the TriMet/Travel Portland/City of Portland “Tour PDX” app contest. The presentation occurred at the Software Association of Oregon Ignite event.

Our app “Transit Board Hotel™” was the winner. The app was developed on top of the Transit Appliance architecture stack by my Transit Appliance co-developer, Matt Conway. Matt is a sophomore at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. He is majoring in urban geography. He plans ultimately to get a degree in urban planning.

Here is Matt’s description of the app:

Today, we are pleased to announce the introduction of a new application for the Transit Appliance Platform–Transit Board™ Hotel, a transit board designed to provide transit information to tourists and others not familiar with the local transit system, in locations such as hotel lobbies, convention centers and airports. It has won first place in TriMet’s Travel App competition. Here’s a screenshot:

tbd_hotel_screenshot.png

It is destination-based, meaning the host of the appliance specifies destinations that their clients might be interested in, and the appliance loops through them showing transit directions to each. The application only supports TriMet for now, and restricts its searches to MAX and Frequent Service lines, to avoid making people wait a long time for their transit vehicle to arrive. The entire trip plan may be transferred to a mobile phone with the use of the short URL or QR code in the screenshot above (note: that short URL and QR code have expired by now). It degrades nicely to phones with only a basic web browser.

tbd_hotel_mobile.png

We recommend a large-screen appliance for Transit Board Hotel, but the application also works on our 8″ device. The application is highly customizable, from the colors and fonts to the map.

More information is available at the Transit Board™ Hotel development page. Appliances can be set up using the Transit Appliance configuration tool.

The award includes a cash prize of $1,750 – We’ll be reinvesting that back in the Transit Appliance project.

A big thank you to TriMet, Travel Portland and the City of Portland.

And a hearty congratulations to Matt, who is the real winner of tonight’s event!


One response to “Transit Appliance App Takes Grand Prize!”

  1. Congratulations to Matt. Nicely done.

    I do question the use of the word “degrade” of only because it has such negative connotations.

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