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- Trimet Tracker for iPhone updatedJuly 9
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Do you live in Portland? Do you ride the bus? Need to know when the next bus is going to arrive at your stop? Have an iPhone? Then I have an app for YOU!
Trimet Tracker allows you find any stop and get upcoming arrival times. Now you can also get any detour information Trimet makes available from it’s awesome API, and you can now map your stop with the build in iPhone Google Maps app.
I also fixed a few bugs, although there is one weird thing with the Streetcar stops (they don’t show arrivals for some reason). I sent an e-mail to Trimet to see what’s up.
Check it out: http://trimet.onmyiphone.net/
UPDATE: Heard back from Trimet, here’s what they have to say about the Streetcar times:
Unlike the rest of our system, for Portland Street Car arrivals we retrieve the results from nextbus.com. Since their permission for use is more restrictive than ours we are unable to reproduce their results on our web service.
Bummer. Looks like you folks looking for Streetcar times will have to rely on the call-in service and the reader boards at the stops.
- Track Trimet on your iPhoneJanuary 22
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Recently I started riding the bus again full time…if not to save the environment, but to save my nerves from dealing with traffic. After a few days I was reminded about one of the things that bothered me about riding the bus: I hated not knowing exactly when the next bus was going to arrive.
This time around I have my iPhone, so I am able to use the tracker on Trimet.org to see when the next bus came. Except it was really difficult to use on such a small screen. I was able to find out when the next bus came, it took me 2-3 minutes to do it.
So I decided I was going to write an iPhone app to do the same thing, but with a much simpler and easier to use interface. At first I was just going to scrape the Trimet site to get the information. But then I came to find out that Trimet actually has a really nice API to all their tracking information!
So I present to to you the Trimet Tracker, an iPhone app that allows you to easily find out when the next bus is going to arrive at your stop. Just enter your Stop ID and you’ll get a list of all the arriving buses (or MAX or Street Car), what time they will be showing up, and how long you have to wait. If you don’t know your Stop ID, you can also do a quick search by picking a route and selecting from all the stops on that route.
To make it even easier, you can also sa
- 28 NES Ringtones for your iPhoneDecember 17 2007
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The other day my friend Jason Glaspey showed me how he made an Excitebike ringtone with MakeiPhoneRingtone by actually ripping audio from a Youtube video, pulling it through and audio editor then finally dropping into MakeiPhoneRingtone to be able to put it on his phone.
Being the NES nerd I am, I remembered how to rip music from NES games directly. So now I’m going to show Jason up by sharing 28 different NES music ringtones for your iPhone. These are all AAC files that you can drop into MakeiPhoneRingtone, which will make them immediately available as ringtones that can sync up to your iPhone.
I’ve broken the collection up into 4 separate zip files, and I’m calling them NES Ringtone Paks 1-4. I’ve covered most of my favorite tracks from about 20 NES games. Here is a list of all the ringtones:
- Blaster Master Area 1
- Blaster Master Area 2
- Goonies 2 Theme
- Castlevania Level 1
- Contra Level 1
- Double Dragon
- Excitebike
- Kid Icarus World 1
- RC Pro Am Opening
- Legend of Zelda Overworld
- Little Nemo
- Metroid S
- TwitterWhere - Filter Tweets by LocationOctober 24 2007
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Inspired by a post over at Silicon Florist about following local people on Twitter, I investigated whether it was possible to follow someone in a geographic area. The closest I found was TwitterVision, which is a great idea, but doesn’t exactly do what I want. So I ended up taking a few hours and developed TwitterWhere, an aggregator that watches the Twitter public timeline and geocodes what it finds. From there anyone can generate an RSS or XML feed that will pull only Tweets within a set radius around an area. Now you can have a feed of Tweets within 50 miles or Portland, or 5 miles of Manhattan, New York.
For anyone who is interested, here’s how I pulled it off…
I wrote the app in Ruby on Rails, utilizing my favorite gem of all time, Graticule (geocoding and spatial search), Hpricot (parsing the public timeline on Twitter), and a couple custom geocoding libraries I already had cooked up for Unthirsty and Knitmap.
Every minute I query the
- Quick Update on OdenRantSeptember 15 2007
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I added a gallery of the last 10 images so everyone can see what you submissions.