David J Rice

The blog of freelance Designer & Developer, David Rice.

21 Jan 2008

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!

David Rice

If you need help with the Design, Build, Management, Hosting or Support of your project do get in touch, I'd love to hear from you!

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