The blog of Gergely Orosz on Silverlight, .NET and other IT related topics. Follow me I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally finished and published the Edinburgh Bus Tracker application, Bus Tracker Edinburgh. It’s completely free, get it from the Marketplace now:
Main features of the application are:
- Find bus stops based on your location, by service number or by bus stop codes
- Mark stops as favorites and access them with a simple swipe on the main screen
- Acess the most recently viewed stops from the main screen
- Get automatic Lothian bus service alerts
- … all designed to blend perfectly with your Windows Phone with beautiful Metro design
(A note as to why I chose this name versus Edinburgh Bus Tracker or EdinBus: should you not pin the app to the start page it’s somewhat a drag to scroll all the way down to “E” to start the app. Changing the name to start with “B” seemed to put it at my fingertips in the long list app selector as well).
For more information and screenshots, visit the Bus Tracker Edinburgh home page.
If you’re an Edinburgh resident I hope you’ll find it useful on your everyday commute. (And if the lack of this application was stopping you getting a WP7 you can now reconsider it 
) Enjoy!
But who’s going to provide the Blackberry app and when?
Nigel Cook
August 15th, 2011
It’s when a Blackberry developer will do the same as the developers of the iPhone app, Android app and me: devote their free time to develop such an app for the platform.
I wouldn’t hold my breath though: Blackberry is very unpopular among developers due to the fact that it’s ridiculously difficult to develop on it and its user base is slowly shrinking at the same time. The few local Blackberry developers I know only develop for BB at work, and hate it, in their free time they work on more developer friendly platforms.
With a Blackberry you’ll probably be stuck with using the mobile site of MyBustracker – I would be surprised if anyone would “provide” an app for it without getting paid to do so!
Gergely Orosz
August 15th, 2011
Nice work Gergely, I just installed it at the bus stop right now while waiting for a bus. As soon as it was installed, the bus turned up What API did you use to make that happen?
Steven Clarke
August 18th, 2011
Thanks Steven! Looks like I accidently left that feature in it, I wanted to ship it only with the Mango version
Gergely Orosz
August 19th, 2011
Congrats on getting your app out however i’m afraid you will have competition in the next week or so when mine is released
I have been waiting on the Mango update for the sql support for the stops database! Cheers.
marcus forster
August 23rd, 2011
Cool, Marcus, looking forward to it! I’m adding some additional features & tweaks for when Mango is released, taking advantage of some of the new APIs.
Gergely Orosz
August 23rd, 2011
Hi,
Just came across this via Google…I’m actually in the middle of developing a Blackberry version…I’m not convinced RIM is dead yet! It’s sort of a side project so I’m not sure when it’ll be done but sometime in the next 3 months is a fairly safe bet.
Mike
August 28th, 2011
Great news, Mike, seems a lot of users have been asking whether there will be a Blackberry version since the iPhone one was out. Good luck with that!
Gergely Orosz
September 2nd, 2011