I had always hoped to do an iPhone interface for Transit Surfer, using the iUi toolkit to build a web interface that mimics the native iPhone UI.
But Andrew Wallace, a local developer, has beaten me to it and gone one better. He’s written a native iPhone app that uses TriMet’s web service to get arrival data. And he’s working to add Streetcar to it. You can get the app for free from the iTunes store.
Nice work!
Of course, Transit Surfer still has some unique advantages :-)
0 responses to “Beaten to the Punch”
Looks pretty good, but what would be amazing is if it was location aware, and allowed you to select a nearby stop, rather than browsing through per line.
Perhaps in a future version…
Sorry for the double-post, but it appears that he used an ugly hack for the mapping thing, as it calls up Safari to show it on maps.google.com, which then brings up the Google Maps application, but leaves an extra Safari page open.
This might run into problems if you already have 8 Safari pages open. At best, it causes some seriously funky UI slides and blinks to get through it.
I’m no expert on the iPhone SDK, but there’s got to be a better way.
Unfortunately, that is not an “ugly hack” – it is the official way the SDK describes how to interface with Google maps. I would have liked a better way to do it but I don’t know of any other.
Well in that case, it’s just one of many of Apple’s ugly hacks in the SDK, and not to be meant as a mark against you.
Either way, this earned a spot on my first page of icons, and I’ve told a friend about it, who will be downloading it too. Thanks for a great app!
Oh, and location aware for the 2.0 release please! =)
Well in that case, it’s just one of many of Apple’s ugly hacks in the SDK, and not to be meant as a mark against you.
Either way, this earned a spot on my first page of icons, and I’ve told a friend about it, who will be downloading it too. Thanks for a great app!
Oh, and location aware for the 2.0 release please! =)
Meh, I have a Motorola Q. It runs Windows Mobile, and was about $450 cheaper than the iPhone at the time. I’ll load Google or trimet.org instead since I already own this.
Andrew’s app is awesome.
Transit Surfer still has better multi-stop support.
Dave, why use Google or trimet.org when Transit Surfer is better? Just bookmark it in your Q, and use that. Much better in my opinion, than the interfaces of the other guys – especially for low-bandwith uses like phones…
I use Transit Surfer linking to many stops at once so that I can make decisions about which way to walk to based on which stop will have a bus faster. Here are a couple of my most used bookmarks, to see how it works with Transit Surfer:
http://tsrf.us/cgi-bin/pda.pl?l=3908&l=4702&l=6849
http://tsrf.us/cgi-bin/pda.pl?l=3760&l=12788&l=1927&l=1929
http://tsrf.us/cgi-bin/pda.pl?l=2737&l=6420&l=2541
And since Transit Surfer allows multi-stop look ups, I can also use it to make good decisions about transfer-points. Some busses may take longer and less-direct routes than others. Or some busses may take routes which have more traffic. So it sometimes is advantageous to switch busses mid-stream to a bus that is faster or more direct – but often only if the other bus is close to the transfer point. (It doesn’t make sense to swap routes to save 5 minutes in transit if you have to wait 15 minutes at the stop).
So I can set up a query to Transit Surfer with various transfer points along the way, and see if it makes sense to hop off and grab the other bus. A good example of this is bus 10 and bus 17. Bus 10 has a stop a lot closer to one of my locations, so sometimes it is very easy to catch the 10. But bus 10 is very slow through SE Clinton and SE Ladd… Bus 17 crosses bus 10 just before 10 goes into SE Clinton. So if the 17 is coming within a minute or two, hopping off the 10 and grabbing the 17 can save me 10 minutes off my trip!
Another handy use is you can tell if there are two busses on one route that are bunched up. Which usually means the first one is full and running behind, and the second one will be nearly empty. So instead of trying to squeeze onto the first one, if you know there is one a couple minutes behind you can just wait for it instead…
These tools can be very versatile if you experiment with them…
Something that I have noticed is that “1 minute” usually means “due” – I have had busses pass the stop just ahead of my getting there while the tickers still are saying 1 minute. So if you knock a minute off the estimate you will be much safer. This will be true with any of the systems because they all use the same real-time data from Tri-Met.