Do you live in Portland? Do you ride the bus? Need to know when the next bus is going to arrive at your stop? Have an iPhone? Then I have an app for YOU!
Trimet Tracker allows you find any stop and get upcoming arrival times. Now you can also get any detour information Trimet makes available from it’s awesome API, and you can now map your stop with the build in iPhone Google Maps app.
I also fixed a few bugs, although there is one weird thing with the Streetcar stops (they don’t show arrivals for some reason). I sent an e-mail to Trimet to see what’s up.
Check it out: http://trimet.onmyiphone.net/
UPDATE: Heard back from Trimet, here’s what they have to say about the Streetcar times:
Unlike the rest of our system, for Portland Street Car arrivals we retrieve the results from nextbus.com. Since their permission for use is more restrictive than ours we are unable to reproduce their results on our web service.
Bummer. Looks like you folks looking for Streetcar times will have to rely on the call-in service and the reader boards at the stops.
I was working on Unthirsty last night when I came across an example of using a particular geocoding plugin. The addresses they were using were in the UK, and I was puzzled because last I checked the UK wasn’t available in any free geocoding API that I could find. So I tried out geocoding a pub in London and what do you know? Yahoo! came up with an accurate result with precision down to the address. So I tried a few more, and they all worked. This is great news, because it allows us to catalog happy hours in the motherland of pubs. I thought I’d share because apparently this has been around for a while and I didn’t even know about it. Anyone looking around for a free geocoding service for the UK, check out the Yahoo! Geocoding API. Also, if your Rails app needs geocoding support, check out Graticule, and see my snippet to make Graticule failover to multiple geocoding services.
Although it hasn’t been accepted into the directory listing yet, the Unthirsty Facebook App is now live, and you can add it to your Facebook profile. The application will show you the closest happy hours to the location you enter as your current location in your profile, and then will place the 5 closest in your profile homepage. You can also set the default location for Unthirsty to look for happy hours, if you don’t want to use your current location.
This is revision one and may have some bugs, so if you find any leave me a comment. I’ll be working on improving in the next few weeks for incorporation into Unthirsty: Level 2. One bug you may want to know about is that if your current location in your profile isn’t set it will break the app, so if it doesn’t work for you, make sure your information is filled out.
Awesome news came out of Facebook this week that they opened up their system to allow developers to create custom applications that can live in Facebook profiles. I checked it out and started developing my own application, but it wasn’t without a lot of hiccups on the way. My settings kept getting reset, my application kept disappearing, and the API kept giving random errors. Right now I can’t even work on it because the system lost my application and I can’t add it back in. Fortunately most of the work is done on the application living on my server, so I haven’t lost much work.
I am still excited to finish this application and see if Facebook applications take off and become a successful thing, and I’m willing to let them work out a few kinks before I can get my application up and running. I’m just really glad to not be a Facebook engineer right now.
If you have a Facebook account, be on the lookout for some cool apps, and also coming in the next few days there will be an Unthirsty Happy Hour Facebook app available that will show happy hours nearest to your location set in your profile.