Author Archive
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Telling time with open realtime data
This past weekend, I had a little bit of time to work on a hobby project: This is my Sony Ericsson MBW-150 bluetooth watch, showing the next few SF Muni bus arrival times for a nearby stop. The code to fetch the arrival times is running on my Droid phone, and communicating with the watch [...]
18 Comments » - Posted in Data Sharing,Ideas,Mobile,Realtime,San Francisco by Joe Hughes
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
City-Go-Round, a new transit app directory and open data site
This site has been in semi-retirement for a while, as I focus more on things like the Transit Developers group, but I wanted to tell you about a site that just launched: City-Go-Round is in many ways a successor this site’s own Headway Wiki, in that it makes it easier to find transit apps that [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Activism,Data Sharing,Google Transit Feed Spec,Open Source by Joe Hughes
Sunday, December 14th, 2008
Unofficial CTA APIs: Innovation on Borrowed Time?
A couple of months ago, a Chicago software developer named Harper Reed (who also happens to be CTO of skinnycorp, purveyors of some of my favorite t-shirts) did some reverse-engineering of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Bus Tracker web applications to figure out how to access the realtime information that they displayed. He documented what he [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Chicago,Data Sharing,Mobile,Realtime by Joe Hughes
Monday, December 8th, 2008
Two reasons why iPhone is now even better for transit
At the launch of the iPhone over a year ago, I got excited about how good the iPhone was for transit riders, and I’m happy to say that it’s gotten even better in recent months. First of all, the launch of the iPhone application store this July has led to unparalleled boom in the development [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General,Google Transit,Maps,Mobile by Joe Hughes
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Goings-on: Transit Developers and WhereCamp
I’ve been busy working on some things that I hope to be able to share with you all soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to mention a few things: Transit Developers is a discussion group for people who build transit applications, whether independently, or working for transit agencies. If that sounds like you, I [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Events by Joe Hughes
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
TransitCampBayArea report
Since I’ve seen surprisingly few wrapup posts about it (only Tara’s and Alexa’s), I’ll go ahead and say that last month’s TransitCampBayArea event was a real treat, surpassing the expectations of pretty much everyone that I talked to. Here are some of my highlights from the event: • Mike Smith, Director of Engineering at NextBus, [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Events,San Francisco,Transit Camp by Joe Hughes
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Landmark talk on data sharing by TriMet’s Tim McHugh
Update (3/5/08): TriMet sent me an updated version of the presentation; I’ve updated the version embedded on this page, or you can download the PDF. Earlier today at the APTA TransITech conference, TriMet‘s Tim McHugh gave a heartening talk about their experiences with making their raw schedules and and real-time information available to developers. Here [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Data Sharing,Events,Google Transit Feed Spec,Open Source,Portland by Joe Hughes
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
TransitCamp
Those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend should check out TransitCampBayArea, this Saturday and Sunday in Palo Alto. Following in the footsteps of similar events in Toronto and Vancouver, TransitCampBayArea is a “solutions playground” where the emphasis will be on how citizens can help improve the transit experience in the Bay [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Events,San Francisco,Transit Camp by Joe Hughes
Monday, January 28th, 2008
SoCalTIP, an early citizen-run transit site
These days most every transit agency has some sort of online presence, but it wasn’t so long ago that the web was a curiosity known only to academics and those savvy enough to seek out early ISPs. Even at that early stage, the benefits of putting transit schedules online were clear, and so transit riders [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in History,Schedules by Joe Hughes
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
onNYTurf Subway Map
Of the 74 third-party transit sites collected in the Headway Wiki, one of the ones that I’ve been most impressed with is the onNYTurf Subway Map. This donation-supported mapping project, associated with NY blog/discussion site onNYTurf, covers rail and ferry lines in the New York metropolitan area. At first, the map looks like your standard [...]