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Tube Tracker

DATE:

31st May 2011

TAGS:

API ASIHTTPRequest CATiledLayer Core Animation Core Graphics Core Location CSS iPad iPhone Javascript jQuery JSON PHP Python Reachability Website

DESCRIPTION:

App Store statistics:
  • The 12th best selling travel app!
  • Top of the iTunes travel "New and Noteworthy" section

A multi-platform live departures application for London Underground and DLR trains.

Q. What advantages does your app have over other Tube apps?

All of the apps on the App Store do not do anything more than either relay TfL's API data, scrape TfL's website or scrape the DLR Daisy website. Although these are the best sources of information, they only update (roughly) every 30 seconds, and the data is often incomplete or malformed. We have a server that collects all of the information from the API (i.e. every station prediction/summary) simultaneously, and the information from DLR Daisy. As the stations don't get updated at the same time, but contain redundant information, we are able to get fresh information every (roughly) 5 seconds by piecing all of the predictions together.

We also do a lot of other stuff, like:
  • We have departure boards for *every* tube and DLR station (e.g. observe that at Mile End, other apps have no information for the District line),

  • Sensible destination rewriting, (e.g. none of the trains have "Piccadilly Line Train" as their destination in Tube Tracker),

  • No malformed information (e.g. the DLR Daisy website is pretty bad and often outputs gibberish).

Innovative train details screen - shows each train's stops, including how many minutes to each station.

Works on all versions (including first generations) of iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. No need to purchase separate versions!

We also have a web version at TubeTracker.co.uk

WEBSITE:

http://www.tubetracker.co.uk
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