David J Rice

I recently put together an iPhone application to get Translink bus and train times on your iPhone. It started out life as a rails application, I was intently set on “Translink on Rails” for the article title but a last minute change to using the merb framework saw to that. Really enjoyed my first real app using merb, it had a certain freeing aspect having such a bare bones framework to start on.

The iPhone interface was dead simple thanks to the iui library, leaving the guts of the work writing a parser for the completely awful HTML on the Translink site, needless to say I had to get a little creative. Also used my previous tip for cleaning up dodgy HTML.

There are a couple of improvements I want to make before it’s finished such as;

• Earlier and Later links for the search results
• Implement filtering by time
• Implement filtering by future date
• Implement filtering by travel mode (bus and/or train)
• Nicer interface
• Make it iPhone/iPod touch only and display a message to users on other browsers

If you have any feedback or you find it useful please let me know, go try it out!