CiaN:MinDMaP the experience of reading those pages altered my anatomy

Mobile GPS Bus Schedule

Lately I've been teaching myself to program Android applications. So far, the IDE is much easier to understand and work with than the Blackberry one was (referring to a few unfinished projects there, specifically my pizza order app).  I was recently discussing the possibility of the city opening up it's data with open API's such as SOAP with some of the Mayoral candidates here in Winnipeg (Rav Gill and Judy Wasylycia-Leis).  In doing so, it came to light that the Winnipeg Transit has in fact already done this, though it's still in beta.

The API is straightforward, and object oriented, below is a list of the objects that I will have access to:

• Locations
• Routes
• Service Advisories
• Statuses
• Stop Schedules
• Stops
• Streets
• System Messages
• Time
• Trip Planner
• Variants

Looking at the Stops object, it appears to be very simple to pass GPS long and lat co-ordinates to the object to retrieve a list of stops within the vicinity of the phone.  Once the user selects the stop (probably the closest one) I can query the stop schedules object, to get a list of routes and times.  Further selecting a single route will display a longer more detailed schedule for that route.

I'm confidant that this app will be fairly easy to create. Over the next few weeks I will be working on the use cases and object designs, and probably a lot of code.

One idea that was already passed to me (thanks Brian) was to ensure that the data access layer of the app was generic, enough such that it could easily be ported to other cities like Calgary, or Vancouver. Being that it will all be in Java, that should be fairly easy to do, if it's designed correctly. I'm thinking of having data access objects that could take a configuration file, and have the app select the appropriate one depending on the city that it is detected as being in.

If anyone has any ideas of features that they might like to see in this app, let me know and I will see if they fit with my vision. I'll get a Google Code site up soon, to manage bugs and feature requests. And yes, I will create it with the fact in mind that eventually it could be ported to the Blackberry.  And no, I don't care about the iPhone.