Tram Hunter v1.0 RC1

[Andy Botting]

My fellow Tram Hunters,

It gives me great pleasure to present to you, Tram Hunter v1.0 RC1.

Not only does it bring me great joy to think we've almost made it to a
1.0 release, but I think the fixes and new stuff make this the best
version so far.

The basic change log looks like this:
- New 'Action Bar' style and better support for ICS
- We now require at least Android 2.1 (mainly for Action Bar and theme stuff)
- Yarra Trams twitter feed for home screen, which I think is a
killer feature over iPhone app. (It's swipey too)
- Much improved 'Network Map' that doesn't crash and is 'browser'
rendered so we have nice pinch-to-zoom
- Reminder notification for approaching tram (Thanks to Tarcio
Saraiva for his patches)
- Updated Stop database which will fix those stops that would always
give errors (Probably new 'super stops')
- Fix for trams with missing tram icons
- Performance improvements all round
- Better error messages from Tram Tracker web service

There's probably more good stuff in here too that I've missed.

One thing you might notice is that the random quotes are now missing.
There still lurking in the code, but hidden for now. I think the Yarra
Trams twitter feed is more useful, but I'm sure many will miss the
quotes. I'm thinking about a settings option to select either 'Twitter
feed / Quotes / Off'. Would love you hear your thoughts on this.

Also, the code has now moved to GitHub, and all the new issues and
features should be directed there. I'm still in the process of getting
a README properly set up and redirecting stuff from the old Google
Code site, but I'll come soon.

Without further ado, here's the link to the new build:
- https://github.com/downloads/andybotting/tramhunter/TramHunter-1.0-rc1.apk

I'd appreciate putting it through its paces and either letting me
know, or submitting a new issue at:
- https://github.com/andybotting/tramhunter/issues

Lastly, for those who are interested, the latest Google Play (Market)
statistics are looking like this:
- 66,665 total user installs
- 45,510 active device installs

I think this is a great achievement for a little on-the-side hobby
project, considering the small market base of Melbourne tram users.

cheers,

Andy

[James Barker]

Nice work Andy. 

James.

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[Tarcio T Saraiva]

That's great Andy, a lot of work!

I hate to be a party pooper but ... it crashed on my S2 ICS 4.0.3, right away. I forked the code and tried to build but, for some reason Eclipse would not recognise the dependencies and I couldn't build the app.

Tried a couple of things but, after around 30 minutes, I decided to look into it later.

I will let you know if I find anything.

Cheers & beers

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Tarcio T Saraiva
[m] 0413 992 587

[w] http://flavors.me/tarcio

[Greg]

Andy,

Your a star as usual :) Just playing around with the new releases and
it looks solid to me..

I have one question I thought when in the stops screen if we touched
on a tram it would show the remaining route or am I getting confused
with another App..

No crashes for me so far on my CM7.2 Atrix..

When you back in Melb again??

[Tarcio T Saraiva]

Ok so I tried again and now works just fine! The code still plays up a bit but I will get to that later...

The app looks fantastic, so much better - loved the black theme!

Well done mate

[András Nemes]

works a treat on the HTC Desire.

great work.

[Luke Kellett]

Nice one!

I miss the quotes :-) But I think giving users an option is a good idea, as the twitter feed would be quite useful for the normal commuter!

[Andy Botting]

Hey Greg!

> I have one question I thought when in the stops screen if we touched
> on a tram it would show the remaining route or am I getting confused
> with another App..

No, unfortunately I haven't implemented that yet. It's on the list -
but I already had a heap of changes that I wanted to get out the door
first.

> When you back in Melb again??

Actually, I'm moving back for good in September. Can't wait :)

Thanks for the testing.

cheers,

Andy

[Andy Botting]

Hi Tarcio,

> I hate to be a party pooper but ... it crashed on my S2 ICS 4.0.3, right away.

I started freaking out last night because I pulled down the release
from Github onto my old phone and it FC on opening. I then tried it on
my new phone and encountered the same issue. I'm guessing this was the
same thing you were seeing.

I did some quick investigation and it seemed that sometimes when I
pulled the APK file down from Github, the MD5 sum was different.
Downloading it a third time seems to work. I might put the new APK
onto the Google Code site for now until I can work out what's going
on.

> I forked the code and tried to build but, for some reason Eclipse would not recognise the dependencies and I couldn't build the app

I'm now using the excellent 'Action Bar Sherlock' library for the
consistent Action Bar style on older phones (pre-Honeycomb/ICS). I
haven't written up the readme yet for building Tram Hunter yet, but
from the Action Bar Sherlock site:

- http://actionbarsherlock.com/usage.html
"If you’re using the Eclipse Development Environment with the ADT
plugin version 0.9.7 or greater you can include ActionBarSherlock as a
library project. Create a new Android project in Eclipse using the
library/ folder as the existing source. Then, in your project
properties, add the created project under the ‘Libraries’ section of
the ‘Android’ category."

> The app looks fantastic, so much better - loved the black theme!

Thanks. I quite like it too. Had some tricky issues around dialog
boxes where ICS=white, pre-ICS=black, so I've forced most of them to
black and white text for consistency.

cheers,

Andy

[Tarcio T Saraiva]

That's great Andy, thank you for all the feedback. I will have a look at the Action Bar Sherlock in more detail.

Cheers & beers

cheers,

Andy

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[Scott L]

I'd still love to see the gps code poll twice or double check or some thing, the amount of times I have to manually choose the correct stop must be at least 60% and that is across two different phones.

[Andy Botting]

Hi Scott,

> I'd still love to see the gps code poll twice or double check or some thing,
> the amount of times I have to manually choose the correct stop must be at
> least 60% and that is across two different phones.

The way it's been coded is that it will initially show the nearest
stops from the last known location and then try to get a more accurate
location, and update the list. You'll know this has happened when the
title bar shows your accuracy (e.g. +/- 30m). Usually I find that this
is reasonably accurate as my phone is often calculating my location.
Maybe it's that I use Google Latitude, not sure.

To get an initial updated location, you'll have to send off
information about your nearest cell towers and/or wifi access points
to Google's SUPL servers to get back an approx location.
So the major factors of this would be:
- What your location settings are (you'll want ALL the options
ticked on for best results)
- Whether your data is on (obviously will be on, if you want tram results)
- The speed of your data
- Strength of your mobile signal

I also work on an app for the London Underground train system, and I
often use the 'Nearby' option when I'm at a station. Unless I have no
signal, I find it updates quite quickly (within a few hundred metres).
I doubt its too much different from Tram Hunter, except that there are
more points within the location accuracy radius, so maybe slightly
less accurate results.

As I'm not really able to comment on location issues in Tram Hunter,
does anybody else see these sorts of location issues in real-world
type usage? If we have a reproducible problem, then I've got a better
chance of fixing the problem.

cheers,

Andy