Maps, journey planning, icon and the kitchen sink

You lot are my best critics! Every form of feedback gives me insight into what users value no matter how crazy it may be.

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.