As I promised yesterday on twitter and facebook, today is a fun day for GottaGo..
So why is that? GottaGo is retiring. But its younger brother, Transport is taking over the spot..
So this is the official announcement that GottaGo is renamed to Transport.
There is a new logo, a new name, but the App itself hasn’t changed much. We fixed a few issues and improved some minor things like the hitboxes for the Locate-Button and for the Date-Refresh-Button, as they are now a lot bigger.
But, this is again not the fun part :)
Ever since the NDA was in place, I tried to figure out how to get around it. I posted a tutorial about NSXMLParser, which was meant to help iPhone Developers because usually, you’d use DOMDoc and not SAX.
Through personal requests, I was also able to provide some bits and pieces of code because this was some kind of a request of a customer – where you’re allowed to talk about code :)
Now that the SDK has fallen, we have more or less a little greenhouse where we can play around in almost free nature.
A brief history of GottaGo/Transport: It started off as a free-time project and continued as such ever after. I started it to have an example of a real application to help other developers with their own problems. Usually, in books, they always write about your Car object, which has an ivar with wheels and such. Yeah, thanks, not really real-world :) So it’s always nice to look at real code which is used out there.
To look at code, there really is no better way as to look at Free Open Source Software.
This is why I declare that GottaGo/Transport shall from now on be Open Source and distributed under a more or less GPL v.2 license. So everyone can create their own Transport App or learn from it or improve it. (The latter would be really nice!)
What does this mean? Not so much for the users, as they are only getting better software :) (Yes, I truly believe in FOSS)
For developers this means: Just drop me a line and help developing the best Transport Application for the iPhone there is. This also means that Android developers and iPhone developers in other countries can adapt Transport for their need and release an equally helpful App for their device and country.
For those who don’t really understand what I’m doing here: I give everyone the right to improve, copy and adapt my code.
The code is available on:
https://svn.liip.ch/repos/public/iphone/Transport
Actually, I never said “My best payment is if someone leaves his car at home and uses GottaGo at home” as some newspaper says.. . It was more like “I get money for doing other things, it’s just cool that people are really getting agile about getting around by train, bus and tram”. So this still holds: It’s just cool if someone else has success with the same idea and eventually some code of mine and makes public transit more accessible to anyone with a decent mobile phone.
For my part, I’m still contributing to Transport. However not that often, since I have some other very very nice things to show you in a few days/weeks.
If you want to get into the Transport code – beware, there are grown structures ;) I’m still cleaning up the code and I’m trying to set up a how-to to get around the code base.
For now, just sneak around, maybe you’ll find everything yourself. Else: just drop me a line, or wait until the Wiki is set up.
Checkout “trunk” for the bleeding edge version or “tags/0.2.0″ for the currently in-review-waiting-version of Transport.
As mentioned, license is GPL v.2, so play nice! Actually, it’s more of like creative commons – just use it and copy it as you like..
There is another small project in the iPhone repository: Weblocate.
This basically opens a website with the users current location as parameters, maybe a few web developers will like the idea. You’ll just have to find a way to get it on the iPhone :)
Besides that, it’s a nice example of how to use the locator with a timer.
Code is here:
https://svn.liip.ch/repos/public/iphone/weblocate
There is a wiki for Liip / Codesofa iPhone stuff:
https://fosswiki.liip.ch/display/ipho/Home
Any specs and how-tos will be posted there.
Well then, this is it for today. Hope you liked the surprise. Stay tuned for more FOSS software to follow from Liip and from my side.
Hi Marc
Wow, Open Source ist ein cooler Schritt. Ich bin ganz fest gespannt, wie das Echo vor allem von Entwicklern sein wird. Ob sich Leute daran bedienen, oder tatsächlich helfen und die App besser machen.
Ich bin ja in einem kleinen Randgebiet tätig und die Software, die ich mache, ist auch Open Source. Allerdings dürfte das Interesse dafür gegen 0 gehen ;) Es handelt sich um eine Verwaltung von Bakterienstämmen für ein Labor des Biozentrums der Uni Basel. Aber vielleicht haben ja noch andere Labors daran Interesse, wir werden sehen. Trotzdem bin
ich gespannt, wie es sich zukünftig entwickeln wird.
Viel Erfolg und viele Grüsse
Chris
You are one great guy! Weblocate!! :) Thx!
Now: App store! App store! App store! And I’ll owe you something for ever and ever…
Well, will see. But they rejected Big 5 and other apps for doing exactly that what weblocate does.. So you might want to hide it in another app :)
They did? Hm… this might mean they are working on that same feature themselves, don’t you think so?
Cool – I hope you fixed the “Search for more alternative services” bug! Up to now, one gets too many nonesense train-schedules, because GottaGo keeps alive what is called “Search for more alternative services” on sbb.ch Homepage (that’s why I rarely use GottaGo). At least an option to disable this useless option from the sbb-source would be great!
(try it yourself: from zurich to bern one get a lot of useless trains with many stops, when disabling “Search for more alternative services” on the sbb.ch-mainpage, one just get the direct, fast ones. Thanks a lot!
Well, that’s not even on the client side :) But you’re now free to add it as an option.. I disabled it for now, let’s see how many complaints I get now :)
But even without that option, I get those fancy links..
http://screencast.com/t/0FoMtV3AyDF
You’re right, it’s not (only) on the client side – completely weird. The disable-option worked quite well for a while now… SBB have changed their search-engine. I hope to get better results in the next revision of the engine (and promise to complain about this “improvement” at SBB).
Thanks a lot for disabling the “you’ll-get-too-much-information-option” in upcomming release of transport!
Dominik: It’s already disabled. I have my own API built on top of the SBB stuff. But it seems not to work.. There might be a way to filter them through the API but that would require a lot of work, I think. You are, however, free to join :)
I’ve been written in this matter to the sbb-custome-care service. My request is beeing handled since nov 12… it’s obviously a failure of the sbb-website (removing the flag has no effect on the resulting timetable anymore).
Thanks for the opportunity to join the team, I’m flattered. But unfortunately, I’m not able to write code (never made it above some simple websites… and even for those I needed help from our joint friend Urs G.) But: I’ll do some beta-testing with pleasure if that helps you! Just tell me how to apply (you’ve got my email).