seeking a maintainer + testers
masen, 24 March 2013
I started winter term with a personal programming project and expectedly ran out of time to continue. The quarter became difficult quickly, which is exemplified by my lack of postings in February and March. I've been hauled up throughout most of the winter dealing with issues in Parallel Computation, Programming Languages and Objects. Thankfully, last Friday was my final Final and I was able to resume work again.
I'm currently calling the app "WTA Next Bus", and its purpose is to show bus times in Bellingham / Whatcom County. The main use case is to replace walking to a bus stop only to realize that the bus has already come, or that you have to wait quite a while until the next bus. Frequent bus riders often just need a reminder as to when a bus comes to a certain stop. Although WTA maintains a web service which provides this information, it it painful to use on a phone as it was not designed to be responsive. Further, their application is not well designed because it takes several pages and clicks to pull up the requested information. This app provides quick easy access to the information that most bus riders need.
As it happens, I should have wrote this app during my freshman or sophomore year. Now, as I'm getting my first alpha out to the public, I'm poised to graduate and move in just a few months. Having found it difficult enough to write an app that I'd use in my free time; after I move to Seattle, it's going to be even harder to find the time to work on this. That's why I'm reaching out to the Bellingham (WWU) CS community to find someone who wants to continue work on this App! Interested parties will be able to gain valuable experience working on a nearly functional Android application.
There are many directions that the application could take. Here's a list of some that I've thought of off the top of my head. I'm sure if you're interested, you could think of even more.
- iOS version: polish your iPhone hacking skills
- Add mapping support to visualize bus stops
- Polish the user interface
- Work on better caching support/offline mode
- Get the app onto the Google Play Store
Please get into contact with me via twitter \@masenf or via github.com if interested.
Screenshots
Download
[2018/05/18] - these links are broken and the server is down, this post exists for historical purposes only
I'll add build instructions to github soon, but for now, you can play with the app directly. Right now, this (obviously) requires unknown sources to be enabled in preferences.
The source is on github: don't hate, participate