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Event Details & Registration 16th June (Belfast)

Event Details & Registration 17th June (Londonderry)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8009134.stm

I can understand why one may think this, the ‘No Connection’ problem relates to a bug when you loose network then gain it back again, under the hood this is cached by the phone and unfortunately the existing versions are using this.

It doesn’t happen all the time and there is a simple work around, launch a web site (any), then open Status or Deluxe. If you still have problems I’d be really keen to hear from you.

This issue has been fixed and is in the forthcoming release or TubeStatus 2.0.1 & TubeDeluxe 1.1, submitted to Apple.

It’s not correct that Status or Deluxe does not work for 3G; it works on Edge, 3G and WiFi and has been tested throughly on these networks.

Many thanks for all the emails be they suggestions, praise or problems keep em coming!

- Line re-ordering
- Overground & rail messages

For the technically minded, there will also be a number of back end changes, I am moving it all to a dedicated server!  Adopting memcache for improved speed and cache management. The php script has been condensed into a single page and will be using cURL. The iPhone application itself has also had a few under the hood tweaks (yeah I found some bugs) and at this stage I plan to use SQLite to hold users line ordering changes and possibly remember prior updates.

By far, the single biggest request has been to include the underground map. Yes, it’s copyrighted. It needs to be licensed and due to its iconic nature and Transport for London (TFL) are very protective of it. As stated before, my main interest was to create an application to accurately show the ever changing service levels of the underground network in a timely manner.

In my humble opinion, an ideal way to get the tube map on the iPhone is to use the best of what the platform has to offer. The map needs to be faithfully redrawn using Quartz and or OpenGL ES. This would deliver a plethora of functional opportunities, journey planning being one of them. It would be scalable whilst maintaining sharp graphics and could even be animated. This would take a significant amount of work and at this point I don’t know if or when I could commit the time to do this; but the source code is open sourced so others are free to pick this up. Others are also working on PDF and image based solutions that look really promising. You can also download the PDF of the map and easily transfer to your phone using FileMagnet as others have suggested.

Journey planning really needs direct access to the appropriate API’s (e.g a web service). Sure one could post to various webpages and scrape the results etc, but this is far from ideal when sending user selections and obtaining the appropriate results. Train departure boards are beyond the current scope of TubeStatus, but not impossible. People have pointed me to various services on the web that could be used to obtain departure data. Again there are licensing issues around using this data, National Rail will actively block any servers they find automating and republishing departure information.

The icon is a subjective matter, if you feel strongly about it, I am totally open to alternatives; send me some examples that conform to the correct dimensions and I’ll put them up on this blog for feedback. One thing you have to remember is that the white thumb highlight is applied by the platform itself; hence I don’t think any icon with a white background will work with it, but could be wrong. But I accept that photographic icons (as TubeStatus is) are not as clean as graphical ones.

Even though the DLR itself is a malleable rail network with no over all ‘status’ or acknowledged ‘lines’, it can be treated as a single entity and presented in the same user interface as the tube lines. You can then select it to view the detail message information. I did consider introducing a bottom menu bar to separate the underground and DLR but it unnecessarily clutters the interface. Also, the next obvious feature is the ability for users to sort the lines based on their travel routes (another popular request); so it makes sense to keep the tube lines and DLR in a single table view. Unfortunately sorting is not in version 1.1; but is the number one feature to implement for 1.2.

Version 1.1 is in review with Apple and can be released any day now, but given the amount of time it took to get version 1.0 released, it could be another 2 weeks away.

• Downloads: 25,600
• Highest Free Application Ranking Reached: No.3 (UK)
• Status Updates Served: 76,500

Some of you may have noticed a few problems last Wednesday morning; this has been resolved now thanks to my hosting company and on average the server deals out updates in less than 1 sec. Unfortunately TubeStatus updates can only be as quick as the slowest link, so for those on Edge it can take a number of seconds to receive the information, many people have reported good performance, some others not so good. I have found moving with your iPhone (i.e on a bus) can affect it’s ability to download data efficiently. It will vary. As expected, the best performance is achieved when on a wireless connection (1-2 sec).

I have added monitoring to the server so I can easily keep track of any downtime or any problems when they arise.

Next up attending to the enormous amount of feedback I have received…