Comments on: Caltroid 0.1 – Caltrain Schedule for Android

By: Heikki Toivonen

Heikki Toivonen — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:59:25 +0000

@Bill: Thanks for the nice words. I didn’t actually know that the current version would run on the Android devices out there. I started updating it to the latest SDK, but have just been too busy with other projects. I’ll try to find some more time to finish the update. As for help, at this point I don’t need data entry help since I wrote a screen scrape program that gets the schedule from the Caltrain site. Also, Caltrain is participating in a Google-initiated effort to provide schedules in machine readable format, so I might look into switching to that data feed in the future. Something that would definitely be useful, though, would be to send me feedback on the application: what does not work, what kind of features would you find useful, and so on.

By: Bill

Bill — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:01:38 +0000

As a user, the App is great. I am an accountant that lives in SF. I’m great at data entry and would love to help improve this app. It helped me. It is useful!

By: Bill Travis

Bill Travis — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:52:42 +0000

P.S. MTA should be paying you.

By: Bill Travis

Bill Travis — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:50:32 +0000

I love your Android CalTrain App (which can not be found using the Market “Search” utility.) I am a casual CalTrain user and I found your App by accident. I am a 100% transit user. Your CalTrain Androind app may not be perfect but it helped me.

I’m old and have a lot of time on my hands. I can type tables if you can make sense of them and make the data useful. If you need data entry assistance, ask and I’m yours.

I’ve looked at Android SDK a little but, at this time, I would rather let people that know what they’re doing do what they do. I’m from the days of Fortran and Cobol. The highlight of my Senior year in High School was the delivery of a PC that could play Pong…nothing else, it played Pong. BUT, I can enter massive amounts of data, easily, with no problem.

If you want help, I’m volunteering.

sparaxis@gmail.com

By: heikki

heikki — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:27:25 +0000

Thanks Todd. And yes, I know I could do my multicolumn list, but since I am pretty sure this is such a common need that Google will provide such a thing I decided against implementing it. Same with better emulation for drop down lists.

While working on this I also realized a lot of the Caltrain schedule functionality would be applicable to other schedules, especially simple daily commute transits like with Caltrain. It is great to hear you are working on a more universal solution, and given that many public transportation organizations are now offering schedules in Google Transit format it is a good move to concentrate on that.

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:31:42 +0000

Nice app,
I’m working on a similar idea that is generalized to any public google transit data feeds. Regarding your desire for a better list view (ie – more than a single column), it’s not too hard to do. You simply define your own ‘layout’ in res with a couple of textviews and then reference that id when building your adapter. If you use an ArrayListCursor for your data, and then build a SimpleCursorAdapter from that as the backing data for your spinner, you can match column ids to your textview ids to control how your data is displayed.
Cheers,
Todd

By: matti

matti — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:13:16 +0000

Hei Heikki. That is pretty cool! Now we need “Stucktroid” that gets you out of the parking lots also known by their alternative names as 101, 280, 880, etc. and automagically gives you alternate, normally little known but better routing to our destinations.

By: heikki

heikki — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:08:05 +0000

I uploaded a zip: http://www.heikkitoivonen.net/files/Caltroid-0.1.zip

Please note that I work on Linux, so you will have Linux newlines etc.