Melbourne, Australia Train Times App

[diablo_sv21]

Hey Everyone,

Just signed up, this is only the second app I've created and is still a work in progress but if anyone would like to test it I would greatly appreciate it.

Thread title describes it well, it is a completely offline app which will give you upcoming train times for the Melbourne (Metro) Trains. it will detect your current location and give you the times for trains at your nearest station, you can then click for more details on that train and click again to search for extra trains between stations.

I'm hoping the app is fairly intuitive. The UI was kept simple but could probably do with some re-shuffling. At the moment you can only perform searches between two stations on the same line but I plan on having this expanded before I release it on the market.

The initial setup process can take a while as it has to unpack a large amount of data to the phone's Database. You don't have to watch the progress bar if you don't want to, it will continue to update in the background and you can return to it whenever you want. Of course you can't use the app until it is complete.

App is attached to this post. Give it a go, tell me what you think.

Cheers

 

[little_green_man]

Since I hope people will beta test my apps I figured I'd better try somebody else's.
The first thing I noticed was that its not "completely offline". It has to download the schedules and that took me about 5 minutes. So you might want to warn people to run the app at home/office before using it. I liked the labels that said what lines were being downloaded even though I have never been to Melbourne. Speaking of that it said "You are currently near ~Flanders (something) station" when I am not even in Australia - ie not close! Sorry don't recall the exact text.

Then I click on something (sorry not sure what .. maybe a station) and it crashed.
When I restarted it, it crashed again and again. I am a developer and I know bugs happen so I am not shocked. I should mention that the app looks very nice. Log is attached.

 

[diablo_sv21]

Thanks for trying it out!

After I didn't get any responses I didn't really dedicate myself to keeping this thread up to date, so that version is kind of old now. Sorry about that.

The app is still offline, that data was not being downloaded, it was just being un-packed from files which come with the app. I probably could word that loading screen better so people know it isn't using any bandwidth.

I'm sure it would have said you were near 'Flinders Street Station', as I have it default to that when it can't find any stations within a 100km radius.

The full app is now available from the Marketplace under the name 'Melbourne Train Trapper'. There are quite a number of changes from the version I've posted here if anyone is keen to have a look and make suggestions, but otherwise I suppose it isn't really in Alpha/Beta testing anymore.