This holiday season, I’m thankful for the assistance of the PBOT Signals Group (the same folks who bring you Traffic Signals and Street Lighting) who figured out how to help us get a Transit Appliance into the lobby of the Portland Building without violating any City network security policies! The appliance will be beaming bus…

Could Portland Transport be the catalyst for organizing an ecosystem around Transit Appliances? I don’t know, but we’re going to give it a try. We’re launching TransitAppliance.org as a site for coordinating an open source ecosystem for the development of browser-based transit information displays. All you software developers, information architects and web designers, please come…

Best Buy just released a 3.5″ version of the Infocast (it’s really just a Chumby One lightly reskinned). It’s sitting on my kitchen counter (in front of a mini-food processor) running the Transit Board™ display. It’s not actually useful, I need my reading glasses to see it (it would probably work better with a UI…

I’ll be at the Civicwebs Hackathon Sunday (starting about noon). This is a gathering of coders to produce applications in the civic realm using open data provided by local governments (or others). I’m hoping to get some help developing a configuration tool for our Transit Appliance. This would be a simple web-based user interface that…

OK, I’m a geek, but it’s exciting. They are also available in KML format for you Google Maps freeks. And TriMet also has a new web service to quickly locate stops near you. Start beefing up your apps now.