The latest version of Transporter includes a big change to reminders. This is a new take on how repeating server-side reminders could help public transit travellers.
Reminder redesign Previously, reminders in the app continuously monitored for specific lines and informed the user when the vehicle was approaching a stop, and got deleted after being triggered. This was useful for individual alerts, but was cumbersome for any frequent use. However, it did lay the groundwork for something nicer.
I’ve been very much enjoying running this site through Cloudflare right from the start. It gives me free HTTPS with all bells and whistles enabled (TLS 1.3 with 0-RTT, anyone?), and makes the already lightweight website load even faster. Being able to keep a tally of daily visitors doesn’t hurt either.
And just over a week ago, Cloudflare announced their app platform! I took a look and immediately saw a number of free totally useful apps, that fit my purposes nicely.
As I’m finally getting my realtime transit app ready for public release, it’s a good time to go through some things I’ve learned while open sourcing my code for the first time.
Transporter uses MQTT to receive vehicle data updates from the Digitransit APIs. While it’s possible to just repeatedly pull this data, there are just too many vehicles shown on the map simultaneously.
The MQTT feed itself publishes JSON which contains vehicle coordinates, delay compared to schedule, heading, next stop and other useful information.