London Travel Deluxe

London Bus is Crashing! Should I just trash it in a 1 star review?

Malcolm Barclay — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:25:10 +0000

Some users are reporting crashing in London Bus 3.01. Unfortunately there is a mistake in London Bus 3.0.1 for the required minimum OS & I apologise for this error. The iTunes stores states a minimum of 3.1.3, this is not correct, the minimum is 4.0 and it is iPhone & iPod Touch compatible only. The current version will not work on an iPad (as this is iOS 3.2), I am working on a separate app for the iPad.

Update: 3.0.2 is now live in the store and now correctly states the minimum version required – iOS4.

If you are experiencing problems…

Ensure you have the latest OS on your device, plug it in into iTunes and select ‘Check for Update’ on the summary screen.
Uninstall the app (hold down the icon until it shakes, hit the ‘x’)
Shut down (COMPLETE POWER OFF OF THE DEVICE, not sleep mode)
Restart
Reinstall the app directly using the ‘App Store’

You will not be charged again as you already own the App. Please note, you will lose any previously saved favourites.

If you have further problems rather than leaving a 1 star review let me know! malcolm@mbarclay.net London Bus should not consistently crash, has been extensively tested & is stable. I can’t respond directly to reviews, but if you email me I can tell you how to fix it or provide a fix if there is something wrong.

What if I don’t want to update to iOS4?
If you accidentally updated the App the only way you can roll back is if you have a prior back up that you can restore to, for example an older sync or perhaps a Time Capsule back up. I can not roll back your version for you.

Why are you moving to iOS4 only? Are you mad?
For a detailed discussion on why I am moving all of my next app releases to iOS4 only, please go here http://mbarclay.net/?p=640

Where is the ‘Home’ Button?

Malcolm Barclay — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:12:01 +0000

Take me home has been removed. Some liked it, some didn’t. The feedback I did get in the last version is that people wanted more than just ‘Take Me Home’…they wanted take me to work, gym, pub etc…

This feature is best served by adding, rearranging & using favourites (which has also been simplified). I accept this is disappointing for the users that understood, used & liked the feature. The plan being asked for needed to be clearer & not using take me home correctly could easily result in journey plans the user didn’t want.

That’s not to say I won’t bring it back or add something similar in the future. Will have to see how many users vote for it to come back in some form.

Suggest Correction

Malcolm Barclay — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:09:41 +0000

Whilst I have endeavoured to have location for every bus stop in the application there are a small number that I don’t have the details for (about 5.6%). You will notice a “[ Location Unknown ]” label for the stops I do not have the exact address of.

You can quickly suggest a correction or exact location of any bus stop. From the “Routes” > “Route Details” screen, tap a Stop & select “Suggest Correction”. You can take a photo of the stop sign & automatically attach it to an email along with the location details. Or just send an email.

Stops often have whats called an indicator code (1-2 letters), this is usually in a red circle at the very top of the sign, for example ‘X’. Which is why taking the photo is very helpful.

Once you have taken the photo, it is automatically attached to a new email.

Using Journey Plans

Malcolm Barclay — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:56:37 +0000

Once you have a set of journey plans, you can review its details. There are many layers of detail that make up a journey plan. It’s up to you to choose the plan that suits you best & progressively tap to reveal more details.

Tapping on a plan reveals it’s details. Each plan is split into a series (rows) of ‘legs’. These are a summary of steps you need to take in order to complete a journey.

You can check where you’ll be on the Google Map at each leg. Just tap the blue ‘>’ icon to display on the Map.

London Bus contains a lot detail for legs that use the bus. Tap the bus leg to get detailed instructions.

As well as seeing the alternative bus routes available you can pin exactly where the particular stop is. Tap ‘Stop Map’.

Select the stop…

The location of the stop is then displayed in Google Maps.

Plan (Journey Planning)

Malcolm Barclay — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:30:31 +0000

Plan (Journey Planning)

Journey Plan User Guide

Use the plan section to obtain realtime journey plans directly from Transport for London (TfL). An internet connection is required to use journey planning.

How To Get A Journey Plan

To plan a journey, you must enter a from & to location, departure (or desired arrival) date & time and select at least one mode of transport.

Tapping on the From or To Location field will take you to an address details screen. There are a number of ways you can enter an address.

Manual Address Entry

You can enter the partial or full address details in the three line address table at the top of the screen. For example, in the city field you can enter ‘Farringdon’ and hit search, this will find the best match for a central address in Farringdon. Or you could just enter a postcode if you know that. Or just the street number & name, most times the address entry system will obtain the correct full address for you first time. If not, you will need to provide more details, perhaps the city e.g Westminster.

A postcode will always be looked up (verified) for any address you enter. This makes obtaining a journey plan easy & far less error prone than searching by address details alone. If you do not know or are unsure of the postcode, then do not enter anything in the postcode field. Partial postcodes like ‘SE1′ are not allowed. You do not have to enter the space when entering postcodes.

Locate Me

Tap ‘Locate Me’ and London Bus will find the full address details for your current location, including the postcode. The address found may not always be 100% accurate, but for the purposes of journey planning it will be close enough. Due to the way location services work you may need to wait for several updates to obtain your address.

TIP: If you move whilst the application is searching for your current address, it will keep finding addresses for each new location.

Find Station

The location details for over 500 stations including the Tube, DLR, Overground & Rail are included in London Bus. Tap find station and a search box with the keyboard already opened will be presented, enter the first few letters of the station name and hit search or select the found station in the list. The station finder will close and take you directly back to the main plan screen so you can complete any other journey plan details. If you do not see your station in the list, it is likely that it is a station not covered by TfL journey planning.

Once you have located or entered your address details, you can use that address by tapping the ‘Plan’ back button. You can clear all address details by tapping the ‘Clear Address’ button.

Departure or Arrival Date & Time

By default the plan section will alway start with the current date & time and assume you are planning to ‘depart’ at this time. To change this, tap the date & time and select a new date & time using the scroll wheels. You can also indicate that you wish to ‘arrive’ at the date & time entered. The journey planner will then work back in time when suggestion departure times and services used.

Travel By

If you wish to exclude particular transport services from being used in journey plans tap the name of the service. A tick mark will toggle on or off to indicate if it will be used when journey planning.

Journey Plans

Once you have completed all of your journey details, tap ‘Get Journey Plans’. Another screen will be displayed offering several possible itineraries from the TfL journey planner. Please note that journey plans can take up to a minute to retrieve this is not a fault of London Bus as it is awaiting response from TfL. The best performance is experienced on WiFi connections, but it will work over Edge & 3G.

Journey Plan Itinerary

Once you have received a number of journey plan results, tapping on an item in the list will display an itinerary for the journey. Depending on the mode of transport for each leg, varying information will be displayed, for example a bus route will display the stop name, code and direction. Only the top level details for each leg are displayed, this provides a quick glance usability; tap the leg and you can either view further details or have the the position pinned for you on Google Maps.

Use the plan section to obtain real time journey plans. An Internet connection is required to use journey planning. There are a number of ways you can select your from & to locations when journey planning, you can plan by…

Postcode
Address (partial or full details)
General locality
Point of Interest (POI)
Favourite
Station (Underground or Rail)
Bus Stop
Your current location (Locate Me)

How To Get A Journey Plan

Enter a from location
Enter a to location
(Optional) Select a departure date & time
(Optional) Select the services you wish to travel by
(Optional) Set advanced journey plan options
Hit ‘Get Journey Plans’ button

To plan a journey, you must enter a from & to location and select at least one mode of transport (Travel By).

Entering From or To Location Details

Tap just under the ‘From Location’ or ‘To Location’. For example…

DO NOT tap the Blue (>) arrow icon, this is used to take an action with location.

There are a number of ways in which you can enter location details. The location screen is split into 2 key areas:

You can enter address details, OR
Use Locate Me, Find Station, Use Contact or Use Favourite

If you know the name of the station, use the ‘Find Station’ button and select the station from the list. DO NOT enter station names into any of the address fields.

For example: “I want to travel from ‘Bank’ underground station”

Incorrect:

Correct:

Address Entry
Depending on the information you have there are several ways you can enter address information.

Using Postcodes
If you have a full postcode, just enter that in the postcode field (even if you have all the other address details you only need to enter the postcode). The capitalisation and space doesn’t matter.

For example: “I want to journey from W1B 2EL”

Partial postcodes using the area reference (e.g “E14″) are NOT allowed.

Once you have entered the full postcode, hit ‘Search’. London Bus will resolve this postcode to an address and populate the Street & Locality details for you. Postcode resolving is approximate and it may not be the exact address you know the postcode to be in. However for the purposes of journey planning it will be close enough (<100m away). DO NOT re-edit the Street & Locality details.

After you have searched for the postcode, go back to the main plan screen by taping the plan button at the top of the screen.

I am Unsure London Bus Got My Postcode OR Address Right. What Do I Do?
You can always check the exact location the app has resolved your postcode to on the main plan screen. Just tap the blue arrow and select ‘Google Map’. This menu is also used to take other actions with the locations details, for example you can add it to your favourites or save it as your home location.

If London Bus resolves your postcode, rest assured it will ALWAYS journey plan you from that postcode, regardless of what the Street & Locality details state.

Street and or Locality
If you only have a the street information, no problem, just enter that in the street field and leave all other fields blank. In fact you don’t even need the exact street number.

For example: “I want to go to ‘Grange St’, I think it’s somewhere near Old St Underground…but I am not sure. I don’t know the postcode or the locality (suburb)”

Just enter ‘Grange St’ in the street field and hit search. The street address doesn’t have to be a ‘St’ for example ‘Clerkenwell Rd’ and all other forms of street naming are acceptable. You can leave the ‘St’ or ‘Rd’ etc out, but beware this may not resolve to the correct address. For example just enter ‘Bank’ as the street and you’ll notice this resolves to the closest match it could find – ‘Bankend, City of London, SE1 9BU’, enter ‘Bank St’ and that will resolve to – ‘Bank St, Canary Wharf, E14 5NX’; two completely different locations! This is why it’s important to use the ‘Find Station’ when navigating to or from actual stations; if you enter ‘Bank’ in the street field that app will look for ‘Bank’ the street/end/place/road NOT Bank the station.

Locality or POI
Locality & POI searching is the least reliable form of location entry. Many areas, parks, attractions and public facilities will resolve correctly but others will not. You will need to check the results returned.

Locate Me

To journey plan from (or to) your current location just tap ‘Locate Me’. Internet access is required for locate me to work. If you are moving locate me will continue to update the address details for each new location it finds you in. Tapping ‘Clear’ will stop the locate me & clear any address details found.

Use Contact
To lookup & use the address details of a contact for journey planning hit the ‘Use Contact’ button. The contact must have a UK postcode entered for them in their address details.

Application Crashes After Selecting a Contact!
Some users have reported problems after they have selected a contact, the application crashes. I have trace this to a problem with the actual Contact record itself; it’s corrupted. To fix this create a new contact and copy the details across and delete the old contact record.

Find Station
Navigating by station, bus stop and postcode is the most reliable way to enter location details. Tap ‘Find Station’ and use the station finder to filter the list of stations. To hide the keyboard & scroll to the bottom of the list tap ‘Cancel’. Any station that is currently a favourite station will have a star beside it in the list. Upon selecting a station the screen will return to the main plan screen.

Use Favourite
To access your favourites, tap ‘Use Favourite’. All favourite Contacts/Addresses, Stations & Bus Stops are displayed in the same order they appear in the Favourites section of the app. Upon selecting a favourite the screen will return to the main plan screen.

From/To Bus Stop
You can also journey plan directly from or to any bus stop. From in the route details screen, tap the stop and then the plan from or to button.

Answers to common questions (FAQ’s)

Malcolm Barclay — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:29:13 +0000

• Read Me

Answers to common questions

Thanks for taking the time to read the online help. There is a lot in London Bus and a few minutes spent here will help you get the most out of the application.

Why is journey planning so slow!

This is down to the response time at the Transport for London journey planning server. London Bus retrieves all plans in one hit, this way once you have a set of journey plans as you select & view each one the application does not need to go back to the server again. This makes navigating & deciding on the best plan for you much faster. It can take upto 2 minutes to receive some plans; journey planning is generally faster over a WiFi connection but it does work over Edge & 3G. The TfL server will sometimes slow up at the beginning and end of each work day.

Why is there a splash (start-up) screen?

The application will display a screen at start-up while it is loading, the screen is displayed for the duration of the load only and is not an ad. Behind the scenes a lot happens at startup time, what you are seeing here is the trade off between taking an extra second or two to load essential data upfront versus making the user wait as various sections are navigated. For London Bus, taking the hit upfront is far better, once its loaded the experience is smooth and seamless.

I am open to other suggestions for screens, however if I were to take the screen away it would display a black screen for exactly the same amount of time. The splash screen does not slow the loading of the application.

Why isn’t anything updating?

By default your device will join any Wi-Fi service it can, sometimes these services have no initial password to join but do have a secondary login (for example many Airport lounges) in which you pay for wireless access. You can confirm this is the case by loading Safari; it will usually take you to a site to join as a member. Your device will favour using a wireless connection. This means you can end up the situation where you can see that you have a network connection, but can not receive any status updates, departure information or even correctly locate.

To work around this, enter the device’s ‘Settings’ select the network under ‘Wi-Fi’ and ‘Forget this Network’. Or simply turn off Wi-Fi to use the 3G/Edge network. Don’t forget to turn it back on when you’re at familiar wireless spots.

I have a bug & the app crashes, should I just trash it in a review?

Please let me know if you have any problems using the application, I fully support London Bus, and it has very active development. I want to know about the good and the bad.

Most bugs are identified quickly, and solutions are either underway or awaiting release. If you find a bug, please contact me with the details of the issue, I can then recreate the problem & fix it. The application should not consistently crash.

What other features are planed?

Whatever is suggested by you, the end user. I receive a lot of good suggestions, I can’t say they will all get done, but I do try and respond to all emails. Features that are requested the most and I can see merit in (i.e most useful) help set the development road map. So please, email me! malcolm@mbarclay.net

About Me

I spend most of my time in lead or senior contracting roles building all sorts of systems and applications on a number of technologies (Flex, Java, Objective-C, Web Scripting Languages and about 5 different database flavours). Feel free to email or give me a call. Mb. +44 (0)7515 357 232

Why is journey planning so slow!
This is down to the response time at the Transport for London journey planning server. On average it takes about 15 seconds to retrieve a set of journey plans.

London Bus retrieves all plans in one hit, this way once you have a set of journey plans as you select & view each one the application does not need to go back to the server again. This makes navigating & deciding on the best plan for you much faster.

The planing system will wait up to 2 minutes to get a journey plan; after that it will time out and you will need to try again. Journey planning is generally faster over a WiFi connection but it does work and has been throughly tested over Edge & 3G.

The TfL server will sometimes slow up at the beginning and end of each work day.

Why are there no ‘Bus Route Maps’? Will you include them?
There are several reasons as to why London Bus does not feature large or local bus route maps.

TfL do publish several large bus route maps covering various areas of London in detail. I am yet to meet anyone that regularly & successfully uses these maps to plan a journey from or take an unfamiliar bus route, they are indecipherable. See for yourself…http://www.tfl.gov.uk/gettingaround/9440.aspx

Then there are the ones at stops, which are quite useful, however there are 1000′s of these and they often only cover an immediate area (particularly where night buses are concerned). TfL do not normally licence there bus maps and they are constantly changing.

I have plans to eventually show full routes and journey plans (if possible) on the integrated Google Map. Unfortunately I can’t do this yet:

I don’t have the data required
Apple haven’t opened up crucial parts of the Google Maps API (application programming interface) that I’d need to display such a map.

Currently the ‘Route’ details screen is you best visual guide as to the stop & areas a particular route runs through.

Will you merge London Bus & Tube Deluxe?
No. I have no plans to merge London Bus & London Tube Deluxe into one application. I have put a lot of thought into this, essentially they serve two different purposes whilst also complementing each other. I have provided a detailed discussion and answer as to why I believe they should remain as separate applications on my site – Will I Merge Deluxe & London Bus?

These journey plans are wrong!
All journey plans come from systems that run the TfL journey planner. You will get wildly different answers depending on the date & time of your plan. I do not change journey plans one bit. You can greatly influence the plans generated by turning various ‘Travel by:’ options on & off in the main plan screen, see Journey Planning for more information.

The TfL journey planner is not perfect but it’s the only system I have available to plan multi-modal (Bus, Tube & Rail etc) journeys. In order to improve this, I would need direct access to the underlying routing & timetable data for the whole of London & surrounding regions.

Occasionally, London Bus can get the FROM or TO locations wrong. Please do let me know (malcolm@mbarclay.net) if you suspect this has happened. I can easily fix it.

Why is there a loading screen?
The application will display a loading screen at start-up, the screen is displayed for the duration of the load only and is not an ad. Behind the scenes a lot happens at startup time, what you are seeing here is the trade off between taking an extra second or two to load essential data upfront versus making the user wait as various sections are navigated. For London Bus, taking the hit upfront is far better, once its loaded the experience is smooth and seamless.

Why isn’t anything updating?
By default your device will join any Wi-Fi service it can, sometimes these services have no initial password to join but do have a secondary login (for example many Airport lounges) in which you pay for wireless access. You can confirm this is the case by loading Safari; it will usually take you to a site to join as a member. Your device will favour using a wireless connection. This means you can end up the situation where you can see that you have a network connection, but can not receive any status updates, departure information or even correctly locate.

I have a bug & the app crashes, should I just trash it in a review?
Please let me know if you have any problems using the application, I fully support London Bus, and it has very active development. I want to know about the good and the bad.

Most bugs are identified quickly, and solutions are either underway or awaiting release. If you find a bug, please contact me (malcolm@mbarclay.net) with the details of the issue, I can then recreate the problem & fix it. The application should not consistently crash.

Leaving 1 star reviews (even with some details of the problem) doesn’t help me easily fix any problems. I often need to ask further questions so I can accurately recreate the problem and provide a fix.

An unfortunate side of the review system is that as a developer I can not respond to any reviews whatsoever. I see many 1 star reviews where by if the person had emailed me I could have produced a fix or instructed them as to what they were doing wrong.

What other features are planed?
Whatever is suggested by you, the end user. I receive a lot of good suggestions, I can’t say they will all get done, but I do try and respond to all emails. Features that are requested the most and I can see merit in (i.e most useful) help set the development road map. So please, email me! malcolm@mbarclay.net

About Me
I spend most of my time in lead or senior contracting roles building all sorts of systems and applications on a number of technologies (Flex, Java, Objective-C, Web Scripting Languages and about 5 different database flavours). Feel free to email or give me a call. Mb. +44 (0)7515 357 232

Lately I have been developing London Tube Deluxe & London Bus further as well as other transport based applications.

History

Malcolm Barclay — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:28:53 +0000

The complete details of the last 50 journey plans made are saved in the history section in date order.

The most recent set of journey plan results will be at the top of the list. Selecting a journey plan has the same functionality as if you had performed the search in the plan section. An internet connection is NOT required to view any journey plan in history.

TIP: When you have an internet connection, use the ‘departure date & time’ in the plan section to forward plan your journeys. You can then access the journey plan result at anytime in the history section (i.e when you are offline).

Removing Journey Plans From History
You may need to periodically remove old journey plans from history. You can remove an entire set of journey plans or individual ones that perhaps don’t meet your requirements or you no longer need. Tap the ‘Edit’ button, select the plan and hit delete. You can also swipe from left to right accross the journey plan & select delete.