[ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

About

BeTrains is my first Maemo/Qt/Mobile application (criticism always appreciated) for Belgian train users. It has been in development for some months, and it aims to provide a user-friendly way to quickly look up train connections or liveboards.

I've put a demo on Youtube. Though some months old, the UI is virtually identical to the current one, I've feature-frozen the code for a while to get a stable version.

iRail

It has been developed in conjunction with the iRail project, which provides an open API for transport data. Currently the API is restricted to trains in Belgium, but we're very actively contacting other parties to get more data, from international sources as well.

Features

The current version is 1.0.1, which should work pretty well. The following features are present:

• Planning trips
• Looking up liveboards
• Real-time visualization of delays
• Favorites/history
• Internationalized (currently only English, French and Dutch. If you know German and would like to see this application localized: please contact me!)

It is written in Qt, with the application MVC-y split into an API wrapper and a QWidget-based UI. (By the way, many other wrappers exist for the iRail API.)

I've got some more features in mind (localization of station via GPS, maybe a social aspect), but those might take a while as I plan (or rather planned) to port the application to Symbian as well. Although the future of that port isn't clear yet, I will maintain the Maemo one, so if you got any feature requests: please post!

Updates

• 2011-02-28: 1.0-beta2 entered extras-devel!
• 2011-03-29: 1.0-beta3 released.
• 2011-03-31: 1.0-beta4 released.
• 2011-04-06: 1.0.1 released, and entered extras-testing!

Other

Lastly, BeTrains is also available for many other platforms! Have a look at the official site, where you'll find versions for:

• iPhone
• Android
• Windows 7 (WIP)
• BADA (WIP)

Some links:

• Bug tracker
• Source code
• Nightly builds

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

Update! Beta 3 and 4 have been released, the former one fixing a progress indicator bug, and the latter fixing the bugs that beta 3 introduced.

Unless bugs are found, I'm going to release this soon. Next up will be Symbian, and in parallel to that buses as well as other countries should get added.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

Ok, I've only seen this app in the repos today, but really want to thank you for this one! I don't use public transport all that much myself, but since I'm the only one with mobile data, I always ended up having to check b-rail. this is way easier to use!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

Thanks :)

In other news, 1.0(.1 to fool the autobuilder) has been released, as -beta4 seemed to work well enough.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

I'm also a happy BeTrains user since a month (something like that), thanks for your efforts to port this application to Maemo! (Better: to write it from scratch - I think you wrote this from scratch, no?)
I have to say that I was a bit skeptical at first; the browser and the m.nmbs.be website were doing the job just fine. But now i'm using BeTrains every time for my train searches, and because of these two reasons:

- MUCH smaller data imprint
- Application remembers your favourite itineraries, which makes it much faster to use

I see that you are even thinking about more features, nice! Is portrait mode doable or isn't that on your to-do list? Now that the n900 is getting more portrait-friendly with the cssu, it would be a nice feature imo. Especially for an "on-the-go"-program like this, one-handed use would come in handy. Text input will always be a landscape/two-handed operation, but tapping on one of your favourite itineraries is perfectly doable with one hand ;)

(A bit off-topic: I see that you are talking about buses support, a buses travel application would be welcome indeed, the "De Lijn" website is a painful experience on any mobile device ;))

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

Indeed, written from scratch :) Only existing applications at the moment I started BeTrains for Qt, were the Android version of BeTrains and the old mobile website, both of which I couldn't easily re-use code from.

Then you might also like the new mobile site we developed, irail.be, which uses some fancy HTML5 features to implement favourites, as well as geolocation. I sometimes ask myself if a native application is still worth it, but personally I still much prefer it over the website.

The current UI-code doesn't easily allow that. But, in order to get it running on Symbian I will have to rewrite most of that code anyway, after which it'll be relatively easy to implement portrait mode for the N900 as well.

That's the plan. But we firstly need to get proper access to the data, which tends to be problematic (we're a vzw/npo, and although the European law dictates that public transport data cannot be copyrighted / should be pubicly accessible, we cannot affort to get sued). DeLijn wants to give their data, albeit on certain conditions; MIVB doesn't even want to talk to us; and I don't know if we already contacted the TEC.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

thanks for this work, really appreciate to see Belgian specific stuff appearing for Maemo as well.

I do seem to have a problem with the "Bekijk vertrekken" screen. It doesn't refresh, still showed the entry from long time ago, the first time I tested it.
When I tried "Meer" I got a error message saying something like "no data can be found", or similar.
I can't reproduce the error anymore as that screen is now corrupt and the "Meer" button is there, but can't be pressed and the left side of the button is partly blanked.

I can still go back and use the other functionality. I'm on v1.0.1-1 already.

I then removed and re-installed be-trains, it seems to improve things, at least the blocked/frozen "meer" button is fixed. There is still a visual artifact (a blanked rectangle, in background color, under the "Station" button and partly under the station input box. It extends to the height of the "meer" button. The "meer" button is completely visible now.
This blanking area blocks the beginning 2.5 cm of the name of the destinations when doing a re-entry in this screen.

it looks very similar to the original issue, with the only difference the fact the screen still respond and works. Only the re-entry has this issue.
After entering a new station, the screen is redrawn correctly.

if I could offer a suggestion for the traject info, can you include already the spoor info at a higher level in the process ? Mostly I'm not interested in what the stops in between are, I just wanna know the times, changing locations and track info. As quickly/concise as possible.

If I want more detailed info, then I'm happy to drill deeper and wait longer. But the track info I think could be included on the expanded "verbindingen" screen, without going to the "verbindingsdetail" screen.

btw, I had a look at the irail.be site. Indeed nice and very fast. Keep up the good work !
Overall, a QML application could be soo nice (look at cutetube-qml), this technology has soo much potential on the UI side now as well.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

wow... Nice!

I see there is also an Android implementation that offers more functionality, like figuring out the nearest station. Don't know how useful that can be...

Having a mobile interface for De Lijn would be great however, their website is indeed a pain.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

Hmm, this sounds much like a bug I had been experiencing for quite a while, which I haven't been able to track down & fix properly. I worked around it by triggering a full refresh using the loader widget, but I recently refactored that code. I might have broken the workaroun there, will have a look tonight.

I'll have a look. Problem is that I don't want to overflow the user with too much information, and I don't have much free space left due to the potential length of some stations. I'll have a look.

That's the rewrite I have been talking about :) Too bad I started with a regular QWidget-based UI (because QtComponents for Maemo is still non-existant AFAIK, and it was for sure when I began with this project), because it means rewriting quite some code.

Yeah, the Android version has been available quite a while longer. Although geolocation shouldn't take that long to add, Symbian is a priority target right now. I'm trying to attract some more devs to help out, so I can focus a bit more on the backend code, but so few people are enthusiastic about writing in C++, let alone for Symbian :( (although Qt already improves the situation a *whole* lot)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] BeTrains: travel application for Belgian train users
 

First i'd like to thank you for bringing betrains to the n900.

But, since i ordered one, i'm wondering if you have plans for a version on the n9?

Thanks.