iTransit is still awesome!

Try http://www.tramtracker.com/

No pretties, all the data

I agree that itransit is awesome.... when you don't know the tram tracker ID or station time. But on 3G it's just too slow! Anything that takes me about a minute or more to load is too long.

It's faster to call the phone number. Remove some of the eye candy and make it fast and a maximum of 3 taps to get to a search or select.

All the data is cached, so when you reload the page it only grabs about 2KB from the server, the first time you ever visit it it will be slow as it caches itself. Thats actually the first time I've heard it called slow, most comments I get are people saying its pretty fast, anyone else having slow loading problems? Might be something I need to look into.

To search: open site -> Tap Trams -> tap Search, enter stop id/stop name -> tap stop name
To browse: open site -> Tap Trams -> Tap route -> Tap direction -> Tap stop name

So 2 taps to search, three to view search results. 4 taps to browse.

Alternatively, you can add the stop/station/whatever to your bookmarks/home screen and it becomes a 1-tap lookup.

-bok

I know that half the problem is probably optus' absymal browsing speeds. All web requests seem to take forever to ping and do the lookups through their network. When you're using the web app and trying to jump between screens, each lookup adds an extra 10 seconds or so.

I'm not sure what you can do to alleviate it, perhaps an ajax keep alive time of 5 seconds might stop it dropping the connection? *shrug*

However, I will say that when using wireless, its awesome. The maps are especially good, although, it doesn't always like to find the location on corners. It would also be good if you could display the tramtracker stop ID when you're doing a search, it would be useful to know it instead of just the stop number.

iTransit needs Canberran buses.

I'm rewriting the UI code for it now so that everything but the actual time lookups are cached - can get most services down to a 10KB transfer over the wire for the initial caching. We're working on a Native App too which should pretty much fix everything It'll be a paid app though - the web app will continue to be free.

Do you mean when you're browsing? The tracker ID comes up when searching. I can add the tracker ID into the "title" at the top when viewing a stop, would that help?

-bok

Yeah in the title would be good, or in the results. Either would work. It's useful to know what it is for future lookups (ie on the computer at work or on a phone)

The other thing i've noticed is slow is when you're doing a lookup by TTID, the smart filtering is nice, but it starts the filtering before I've finished typing. So if I enter my TTID, it can take 6 seconds to enter a 4 digit code! Perhaps it could wait for 200-300ms before filtering so it knows i'd finished typing.

Don't get me wrong.. I'm a big fan. I'd just say that this app is basically the #3 reason I even own an iphone and this would be the one app I use multiple times per day.

My suggestions come out of a desire for perfection

That I can fix :-)

Try now - the autocomplete is disabled when you're entering a tracker ID, and the tracker ID should be visible in the title of a stop.

-bok

Nice one! Works really well now. Much snappier searching!

Does your search start at the service level (tram, train etc) or does it encompass all services? Maybe it could move to the home screen and search for all services?

What would be really awesome is to do journey planning based off your current location (or a bookmark, or a search) and plan your journey. I'm guessing this is a paid app feature?

As I'm sadly without an iPhone but have a Windows Mobile phone, I was looking at mobile.itransit.com.au which says it's still active.

But I wonder why mobile.itransit.com.au returns different train times to iphone.itransit.com.au. For example, select Balaclava to Sandringham in both pages (eg. one in Firefox, one in Safari), and you get quite different time estimations.

Another useful site I just discovered is tramtracker.com which makes accessing Yarra Trams timetable information must faster. As suggested at ohmslaw.org:
"Even better this service becomes a simple URL in the form tramtracker.com?id=<StopId>&rt=<RouteNumber> This is brilliant. You need to know your stop id but every stop has it written on it, and its on the Yarra Trams website Now I have a couple of bookmarks for the stops I use regularly."

B