Ask and ye shall receive: ByUnderground
In December last year I attended a bloggers briefing held by Transport for London on how they’re planning to communicate transport info to the public, particularly via web and mobile.
Although I never typed up my thoughts from that meeting the clever folks at Inreal Technologies, a Cambridge based start-up, spotted a comment I’d left on Annie Mole’s blog stating that what most interested me would be mobile applications for transport info.
Inreal offers a free app called byunderground which differs from similar sites (like TFL’s wap service). Here’s some of the key features:
- Minimised navigation: The opening page provides a view of the status information for all lines in the London underground (excluding DLR). The user doesn’t have to click any links in order to see the line status of any one particular tube line
- Familiar look and feel: The Line status view uses a layout that regular LU users are familiar with. Exceptions in tube line services are marked with a coloured background (yellow=minor, red=severe, blue=planned) which aims to help identify affected lines
- Details view: When a line is experiencing delays, details of the incident can be viewed by clicking on the status hyperlink of the given line. In addition to the description of the problem, the details view also tells you how long the problem has been ongoing (Since: H hours M minutes ago). If the browser on the handset supports the feature, the user is also offered a link to forward the report as an SMS
- Line closed information: When the last tube has completed its service (early hours of the day) the line status view shows the status as ‘Planned closure’. In the morning when the first tube departs the status changes to ‘Good service’ unless otherwise reported
If you want to try it just open http://byunderground.com in your mobile’s browser.
