Tim Almond

When I’m travelling, I use my smartphone to get certain information. What’s really great is when people build sites that consider the needs of those without a lot of screen space or bandwidth. When you’re on a phone, you want it brief and to the point.

So, I’m loving Accessible Rail Times from Matthew Sommerville. This seems to be a screen-scrape of the National Rail Enquiries site which allows someone on a cellphone to get what they need rapidly. There’s things in here that shouldn’t be the work of a geek in his spare time. Being able to set up a URL to shortcut your "give me the next train times from Bedwyn to Reading" to a single click should be core functionality of a train time site.

It’s not that hard to code. Particularly if you’re not having to do it in a Heath Robinson fashion like Matthew is. Take the URL, substring it and pass it to whatever internal service you call when someone enters the details.

Even better, National Rail, why not open up your train times to a webservice. Let a bunch of geeks build whatever stuff they want on top of your data. Maybe someone will synchronise their times with Outlook to warn then when to leave work, or to a phone application so on their way to the station, they can tell their wife what train they’ll be on. What’s the problem with that? Informing passengers will improve service to people, and keep them going by rail.

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Tags: Technology //