Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
(english version below)
Nach langer Pause bei den Updates von FahrInfo Berlin gibt es nun endlich wieder etwas Neues: FahrInfo Berlin 2.4 (App Store-Link) ist verfügbar! Die zwei wesentlichen Neuerungen sind Push-Benachrichtigungen zur konfigurierbaren Erinnerung an Ankunft und Abfahrt und eine virtuelle Umgebungsansicht, welche nahegelegene Haltestellen anzeigt und per Tipp natürlich auch die aktuellen Abfahrtszeiten in bekannter Form bereit hält (die Umgebungsansicht ist nur auf dem iPhone 3GS verfügbar).
Um eine Push-Benachrichtigung hinzuzufügen, muss lediglich das entsprechende Glocken-Symbol in der Verbindungs-Detailansicht oder in der Abfahrtstafel angetippt werden. Standardmäßig wird 5 Minuten vor einer Abfahrt bzw. 1 Minute vor einer Ankunft benachrichtigt – die Abstände sind in den Einstellungen konfigurierbar. Benachrichtigungen werden selbstverständlich auch zugestellt, wenn FahrInfo Berlin nicht aktiv ist.
Push-Benachrichtigungen und die Umgebungsansicht sind für Berlin kostenpflichtige Features, und müssen per In-App-Kauf aktiviert werden. FahrInfo Berlin Pro ist bis zum 31.12.2009 zum Einführungspreis von 0,79 EUR erhältlich.
Weitere Verbesserungen betreffen die Kartenansicht, welche jetzt drehbar ist und somit auch im Querformat benutzt werden kann, und die nun auch auf den BVG-Tramplan und das 24h-Netz verlinkt (nicht in der Anwendung enthalten). Außerdem wurde die Abfahrtstafel überarbeitet und zeigt bei aktuellen Abfahrtszeiten nun die verbleibenden Minuten an statt der absoluten Uhrzeit.
english:
After a long period of no updates, FahrInfo Berlin 2.4 (App Store link) has been released! The most important new features are push notifications for departures and arrivals and a virtual monocle mode which displays nearby stations (monocle only available on iPhone 3GS).
To add a push notification, simply tap the bell icon next to the arrival or departure time. By default, you will be notified 5 minutes before a departure or 1 minute before an arrival – you can set up the time in settings. Notifications will be delivered even when FahrInfo Berlin is not running, of course.
Push notifications and the monocle mode are features that must be purchased via an In-App purchase, and are available for an introductory price of $0.99 until the 31st of December.
Other improvements include the new maps view, which is rotatable and can be used in landscape mode and links to BVG’s Tram and 24h maps (not included in the app). Furthermore, the departure monitor has been updated and now displays the remaining minutes for current departures instead of the absolute time.
Posted in Aurora | 27 Comments »
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
Today I submitted the most recent update to FahrInfo Berlin to the App Store. Since the media reported about FahrInfo’s little BVG ‘issue’, I had enough time to talk to Verkehrverbund Berlin/Brandenburg (VBB), the public transport group which BVG belongs to, and much to my surprise I found very nice and open-minded people there which let me continue to use their HTML form for trip queries, provided nice PDF maps that are just as good as the old BVG map was and also supplied me with a list of all of their 13,282 stations, including GPS coordinates. I had ~650 mapped stations before, so this is really great news (taz, german).
I still didn’t have time to finish the UI improvements I talked about a while ago, but I wrapped up the new maps and station list plus some query speedups and submitted that to the App Store as FahrInfo 1.2, a few screenshots of which you can find below.
On a side note, I am currently working for Stuttgart’s public transport provider SSB to provide a FahrInfo application for Stuttgart, which will feature the new UI. I took a lot of time to refactor FahrInfo’s code in order to add the new query backend for Stuttgart, but that in return means the new UI will work for both Berlin and Stuttgart and Berliners will be able to benefit from that immediately. Isn’t software engineering awesome?
Posted in Trip Planner | 41 Comments »
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
Despite a load of work on some iPhone projects, we finally announce the release of AppFresh 0.8.2. It adds some new features and addresses a few important issues, most noticably a startup crash on Mac OS X Tiger. We encourage all Tiger users to update to AppFresh 0.8.2 by downloading it right here.
New features and changes in AppFresh 0.8.2:
- Release Date column added.
- Number of concurrent downloads can be configured in toolbar gear menu.
- Progress indicator is hidden when download is finished.
- Not excluding /Users/Shared by default.
- Download locator displays URL on link mouseover in a new status bar.
- Download locator saves located URLs for downloaded version.
- Bugfixes
Please note, if updating to the new AppFresh version does not work for you, please download the update right here.
Posted in AppFresh | 4 Comments »
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
Deutscher Text unten!
Berlin Trip Planner (or Fahr-Info Berlin in German, iTunes link) is an application for iPhone and iPod touch that makes it easy to find connections in Berlin’s public transport system while on the go. Berlin Trip Planner was developed in July and has been available for free through the App Store since. More than 20,000 users (Berliners and visitors alike) have enjoyed up to date timetable and connection information as well as an integrated map of the public transport network.
Last wednesday an update to Berlin Trip Planner was released which removed the integrated map, after Berlin’s public transport company (BVG) claimed copyright of that map (BVG link) and wouldn’t allow further use of it when questioned. Neither the use of timetable information (which come from public transport group VBB) nor the application itself have been subject of said complaint, all that was objected was the distribution of the PDF map with the Trip Planner application. BVG allowed to link to the overview map but this offer hasn’t been employed since every user can already do that and it doesn’t allow integration with location services.
Publication of the update shows that BVG’s objections are being accepted and respected, although user’s complaints are reasonable and comprehensible as well. Alongside German newspaper taz, heise, Spiegel Online and international papers such as Wired, among many others, reported about the debate. As their first statement after four weeks (when my e-mail offering cooperation remained unanswered), BVG issued a press release in order to address the reports today.
BVG points to its mobile website which can be used with any other phone and has a realtime schedule but no network map either. The iPhone application’s ability to display nearby stations and speed up input using location services, one of the application’s most loved features, remains unequaled, and might be one of the reasons why some people don’t buy any other phone.
I still believe that this native application can maintain an edge over a website anytime. The application is not yet the best of the best in terms of usability, but an improved version is being worked on – and it will definitely preserve the clear display of possible connections on a timeline. Other upcoming features will be more stations with coordinates, integration of the iPhone’s address book and Google Maps routes to the nearest station.
I still see VBB as a reliable partner for providing timetable and connection information, and should BVG become interested in a cooperation, they are very welcome, just as any other public transport company is.
—
Fahr-Info Berlin (iTunes-Link) ist eine Anwendung für iPhone und iPod touch, die es einfach macht, unterwegs Verbindungen von A nach B im Netz des Berliner öffentlichen Nahverkehrs zu finden. Fahr-Info Berlin wurde im Juli entwickelt und anschließend kostenlos im App Store veröffentlicht. Seitdem bot Fahr-Info Berlin mehr als 20.000 Nutzern (Berlinern wie Auswärtigen) aktuelle Fahrplanauskünfte und auch einen in die Anwendung integrierten Netzübersichtsplan.
Am vergangenen Mittwoch erschien ein Update von Fahr-Info Berlin ohne Netzübersichtsplan, mit dem einer Beschwerde der Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) entsprochen wurde, die vor vier Wochen ihr Urheberrecht am Netzübersichtsplan (BVG-Link) geltend machten und die weitere Verwendung auf Nachfrage nicht gestatteten. Weder die Nutzung der Fahrplandaten (deren Abfrage über den Verkehrsverbund Berlin/Brandenburg (VBB) erfolgt) noch die Anwendung an sich wurden von den BVG beanstandet. Die Beschwerde betraf allein den Vertrieb des Netzübersichtsplans als PDF mit der Anwendung. Das Angebot der BVG, auf den Netzübersichtsplan zu verlinken, wurde nicht in Anspruch genommen, da diese Möglichkeit bereits jedem Benutzer selbst offen steht und keinerlei Integration mit der Ortungsfunktion des iPhones erlaubt.
Die Veröffentlichung des Updates ohne Netzübersichtsplan soll zeigen, dass die Einwände der BVG grundsätzlich akzeptiert und respektiert werden, auch wenn die Beschwerden vieler Nutzer verständlich und nachvollziehbar sind. Neben der taz griffen das Thema u.A. heise, Spiegel Online und auch internationale Zeitschriften wie Wired sehr kritisch auf. Die BVG reagierte heute mit einer eigenen Pressemitteilung auf die Berichte und äußert sich damit seit meiner unbeantworteten Mail mit einem Angebot zur Zusammenarbeit vor vier Wochen zum ersten Mal.
Die BVG weist auf ihre auch mit allen anderen Telefonen nutzbare Mobilseite hin, die als Mehrwert zwar eine Echtzeitauskunft bietet, allerdings ebenso keinen Netzübersichtsplan. Daneben unerreicht: eines der beliebtesten Features der iPhone-Anwendung Fahr-Info Berlin, die Anzeige der nahegelegenen Haltestellen zur schnelleren Auswahl, die sich auf die Ortungsfunktion des iPhones verlässt und wohl ein Grund dafür sein dürfte, warum manche Leute eben nicht alle anderen Telefone kaufen.
Ich glaube weiterhin daran, dass die native Anwendung einer Webseite jederzeit eine Nasenlänge voraus sein kann. Nun ist Fahr-Info Berlin noch nicht der Usability letzter Schrei, aber an einer verbesserten Version wird gearbeitet – die übersichtliche Darstellung der Verbindungen an der Zeitachse bleibt dabei auf jeden Fall erhalten. Weitere kommende Features sind z.B. mehr Haltestellen mit Geokoordinaten, eine Integration des iPhone-Adressbuchs und Google Maps-Wegbeschreibungen zur nächsten Haltestelle.
Ich sehe in der VBB nach wie vor einen verlässlichen Anbieter von Fahrplanauskünften, und sollte die BVG Interesse an einer Zusammenarbeit haben, ist sie wie jeder andere Verkehrsbetrieb jederzeit gerne willkommen.
—
Posted in Trip Planner | 31 Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
AppFresh 0.8.1 was just published in the stable update feed. The new release fixes most important known issues and adds some minor new features, including more flexible definition of scan locations and an improved version detection. If AppFresh keeps reporting wrong versions for apps such as Opera and Google Earth, please try to reset the version information using the menu action in the main menu.
Complete list of changes:
- Find applications outside /Applications
- Fixed the bug where no applications would be displayed at all
- Improved version detection for some apps
- Restore column ordering/width on launch
- Improved the log console (check out the Window menu)
- Fixed default download folder on Leopard (~/Downloads)
- Skipping properly updates categories
- Fixed category dragging bugs
- Fixed a file system case sensitivity issue
- Fixed a bug in downloading updates
- Fixed inspector release notes/description display after download locator cancel
- Fixed empty progress category bug
Since the release of AppFresh 0.8, we started using a second update feed so you can follow bugfixes and new features more closely. If you experience any problems, please make sure to check out the new nightly update feed, selectable in the preferences.
Posted in AppFresh | No Comments »
Friday, October 17th, 2008
With the immediate availability of AppFresh 0.8 we finally released a great set of changes and bugfixes that aim at making AppFresh more stable and usable. The list of installed applications as well as the toolbar have been completely redesigned. AppFresh now lists all applications in a nice table view, making it easy to customize the attributes of interest, to browse groups or to use drag&drop. For downloading and installing updates, AppFresh now uses an integrated download manager, making it easy to add and cancel downloads in the background.
While preparing the upcoming release of AppFresh 1.0 we also started thinking about its licensing. We always wanted to keep AppFresh free while under development and change to some commercial licensing with release 1.0. But at this years WWDC we were encouraged in many talks we had, to go a different way and have been thinking about it ever since. We are not yet sure about all details, but we want AppFresh to be used by as many people as possible. That’s why we want to keep AppFresh free for personal use, even after release 1.0. We will get into more detail by the end of the year, but we still thought it’s of some interest already.
With AppFresh 0.8 we also introduce a way to follow beta versions more frequently. In the preferences you can now choose to follow beta builds.
Posted in AppFresh | No Comments »
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
It has become more and more popular in the last weeks to write about one’s personal experience developing and submitting iPhone applications to Apple’s App Store, so I’d like to share how all of that worked out for me.
There has never been an official announcement on this website, but I have been writing an iPhone application for a little while now (Generally, there are very few iPhone application websites, since the website and promotional aspect of iPhone application development is handled by Apple through the App Store, where a description and screenshots of your application can be sent in together with your application and where – you don’t get that with your website – potential user can easily search for applications and browse them by category). Anyway, that application I’ve been developing is called Berlin Trip Planner (or Fahr-Info Berlin, which is the German name), and what it does is simple: it gets you from A to B, in Berlin, using public transport, at any time. If you have an iPhone, check it out, it’s free. And people simply love it, which makes me really happy.
To write, test and submit an iPhone application, there are a few prerequisites. First, you need the newest XCode version with all the iPhone frameworks (the SDK), so you can go ahead and write an iPhone application, which is not that different from writing a Mac application (only much more exciting). This step is easy, Apple made the SDK available for everyone in early spring. The SDK doesn’t allow you to put the application you’re writing on your iPhone for testing though, all you get is the iPhone Simulator, which is useful for most testing, but it’s definitely not an iPhone, it behaves differently in some cases, and it doesn’t simulate CoreLocation or the motion sensor at all. So you really want to get your application on a real iPhone to see how it works.
Step two: Apply for the iPhone developer program. Back in spring, Apple only allowed US developers to apply at first, but eventually extended the program to other countries, so I applied for the iPhone developer program in late spring. Then I waited. For weeks, and almost forgot about it. WWDC passed, where Apple announced they had admitted around 4000 developers so far, from the huge number of developers that had applied (I don’t recall the exact figure right now, but it was more than 10x of the 4000 admitted). I still felt bad about not being admitted, but I was in good company. To make up for it, two weeks later, or two weeks before the App Store launch, Apple told me I had been admitted and could pay my 80 EUR to Steve Jobs and his awesome devices fund. One day later, on the 27th of June, i (finally) got my hands on the beta of iPhone OS 2.0 plus a developer certificate and provisioning profiles that I could use to actually run my software on my iPhone. Great! But I still hadn’t written a single line of iPhone code by that time.
Now, to give credit where credit is due, the idea to write a trip planner application was inspired by Johannes Plunien, author of the brilliant MVV Dashboard Widget (which covers Munich public transport), when we exchanged some AppFresh-related support mails just about at that time. Living in Berlin, and being a frequent user of public transport myself, I know I had to have something like that. By the way, it’s always best to write software because you really need it yourself, because you don’t make wrong assumptions about what the users wants and what he needs, plus there’s a motivational aspect.
Apple had announced that in order to have your application admitted to the App Store itself by Friday, July 11th (the day of the grand iPhone 3G and App Store launch), you had to submit it until Monday the 7th, so I tried to get all pieces together as quick as possible. The BVG, Berlin’s public transport company, doesn’t provide a real web service to their online trip planner, so I had to write nasty code to scrape the HTML form, but fortunately there is a mobile interface which at least uses valid XHTML, so I could use an XML parser to save me some work. I finished that code using a DOM XML parser, the easier way to parse XML, only to discover that while the iPhone Simulator has a DOM parser, the iPhone itself doesn’t, and I had to rewrite it using a SAX XML parser, the more resource efficient way to parse XML. Needless to say, I was pissed, but motivation was high enough that I didn’t really care. The interface was easy in comparison, since in order to make it until the 7th I kept it really simple and didn’t think about usability much (Ooops!). There was even some time left to add cool features, like the ‘nearby stations’ list. For that I borrowed station data, including GPS coordinates of the stations of all major lines, from the very cool Uberbahn BVG/Google Maps Hack, which allowed me to list the stations in your proximity using the iPhone’s CoreLocation feature. Very neat!
To submit the application, you have to build and sign it using a different certificate, which is suited for App Store distribution, whereas your development certificate only works on your own iPhone. The whole process of getting the certificates and matching provisioning profiles, and getting XCode to use them, is somewhat tedious. If you’re lucky, it works, and the application runs on your iPhone, but if you aren’t, then you’re given a beautiful error code and nothing else, so it’s a pain in the ass to get it working again, since you don’t know what went wrong, except for, well, 0xE800003A. Apple could’ve certainly gotten this better, but it’s not rocket science either, and they have updated the documentation lately. Now all you need to do is come up with a description for the App Store, make some screenshots, and package everything up and upload it. That’s not too hard.
Now it’s time to wait, again. Six days later though, and this is different from the experience some other folks have made, my application was on the App Store, not from the first day as promised, but from the second. No mails from Apple, nothing rejected, everything just worked. The process was just the same with my first and (so far) only update, which got accepted in about a week. So, overall, my experience was pretty good. I don’t know how the average time to get accepted has developed in the last months, but it would be great if they could get that down to a few days instead of a week.
I’d like to finish this post by giving a quick preview of Fahr-Info 2.0, which I’m currently working on (I made the 2.0 up just now, I don’t know if it’s gonna be called that). Most of the changes are usability and user interface related, although it will also integrate with Address Book to give you the quickest route to your buddies, have a bigger station database to autocomplete your searches and offer Google Maps directions from your current location to any station. It’s far from finished, so some of that will definitely change, but here are some screenshots:
Posted in Trip Planner | 16 Comments »
Friday, September 12th, 2008
As of today, Home Zone will no longer be available on our website and support for it will be discontinued. There were two issues with the application, only one of which could have been addressed by me.
First, Home Zone hasn’t seen an update for around nine months now, and Leopard support was still pretty bad. The interface sucked and everything was pretty unpolished (that’s why I called it a beta). There had been plans to improve all of that, and none of that would have been a big problem (except for the time required), but it came different. The reason why Home Zone has been neglected is that there are technical issues with both WiFi and Bluetooth technologies, which prevented my vision of Home Zone come true.
Home Zone’s WiFi ability was that it could detect which WiFi networks were nearby and perform certain actions when networks appeared or disappeared. Your WiFi card doesn’t automatically get notified when a new network appears, though. Detecting WiFi networks involves a scan, which takes about one or two seconds, and which is the reason why available networks don’t appear immediately in your Airport menu item when you open it. Now if you want to notice a new network in time, you have to constantly perform such scans in the background, which is also called polling. Programmers hate polling (I’m simplifying, but it’s true in our case as it is in most cases), because it’s always a trade-off between hogging resources (scanning more often) and noticing a change way too late (scanning less often). If you are not currently connected to a network, scanning hurts nobody. This is why Mac OS X can pop up a list of available networks when you open your notebook somewhere. But if you are connected to a network, performing a scan for WiFi networks blocks all traffic for a second or two, just as long as it takes for the scan to complete. This means a pretty nasty hiccup when browsing a website, for example, or listening to streaming radio. Now when Home Zone does that every 30 seconds in the background (or even more frequently), you will very soon be pretty pissed about it, just as you were with a longer scan interval of like 10 minutes, which would mean that it could take up to 10 minutes for Home Zone to adapt to a change of WiFi networks. Sorry WiFi, you’re out.
We face a similar problem with Bluetooth. The Bluetooth chip in your Mac doesn’t automatically sense when a Bluetooth device comes near. Again, you have to scan, and this time it’s even worse. Frequent scanning simply drains the battery of the mobile devices, because they always have to respond to the inquiry, and Bluetooth is expensive, battery-wise. Yes, I’m here. I’m here. I’m still here. Still here. Everyone would get bored of that in no time, and phones are no exception. This doesn’t only apply to your phone, but also to the phones of your coworkers and generally every Bluetooth device in range. We very much value our phones’ battery life, so what can we do? Increase the scan interval? No. This would mean, again, that it might take 10 minutes after you’ve left your desk with your phone in your pocket for well-earned lunch until the screen finally gets locked by Home Zone. It could’ve easily done that by itself in that time. In addition to that, Home Zone’s scanning might knock off headsets connected to phones which only support older versions of the Bluetooth standard, etc. and you don’t want that either. Bluetooth, join WiFi in the corner of the useless.
To improve scan performance, Home Zone might be able to skip a Bluetooth scan here and there and behave intelligently, but all in all you still end in the same dilemma. I finally decided that it wouldn’t be worth it to use cheaper indicators like plugged in USB devices or reachable IP addresses, as they are all lame in comparison, and you wouldn’t want to write such an application without proper WiFi and Bluetooth support. The aforementioned issues make it impossible to write an application with WiFi and Bluetooth support though, an application that is a true Mac application, that is beautiful and just works, without having a negative impact on anything else. I don’t want to require users to understand the scan interval tradeoff and configure it to their needs or manually enter IP addresses. Who the heck knows what an IP address is?
So, I’m very sad to see Home Zone go, but I’d rather focus my attention on other interesting Mac and iPhone projects like AppFresh or Trip Planner.
Posted in Home Zone | Comments Off
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
We are happy to announce AppFresh 0.7. We have worked hard to make AppFresh more stable and improve integration with our application version information provider of choice iusethis. AppFresh now not only shows which of your applications are marked as used in your profile, it also shows applications from your profile which are not yet on your machine, enabling you to install those applications with a single click. We also added support for grouping applications together in AppFresh, so you can merge 1Passwd and its InputManager or Divx and its Preference Pane, for example. Enjoy!
Posted in AppFresh | 8 Comments »
Sunday, March 9th, 2008
→ AppFresh Development Preview 6 (Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 only)
We are very happy to finally announce the new Development Preview 6 release of AppFresh. It comes with a new three-pane user interface that we think is much cleaner and more flexible than the old two-pane layout. The three-pane layout gives the room for new and customizable categories in the left pane. You can now even create your own categories and add applications using drag&drop.
Besides a nearly complete rewrite of the AppFresh core components we added some new features that were requested throughout the last months. We are glad to now support Microsoft AutoUpdate in addition to Apple Softwareupdate, Sparkle and osx.iusethis.com. AppFresh now checks the Microsoft AutoUpdate sources directly without depending on iusethis. Update checking Microsoft applications should therefore become more accurate and stable. If you experience any problems or if you are a Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac user, please contact us in case of problems. Support for native Adobe update checking is being tested, but will likely not be available before the 1.0 release.
Complete list of changes:
- General rewrite of AppFresh core components
- Major speed improvements on scanning applications
- New three-pane user interface without progress sheets
- Added new default categories. Use drag&drop to create a new customizable category
- Added support for Microsoft AutoUpdate
- Added a default group for Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac (not MSO 2008!)
- Added support for checking AddressBook plugins
- Added iusethis fallback checking for broken Sparkle appcasts
- Added new update states for network errors and iusethis fallback checks
- The iusethis description of applications can be shown in the inspector
- Fixed a crash reporter bug
- Fixed a bug when AppFresh would not finish update checking
- Fixed some Leopard compatibility issues
- Removed iusethis autosearch
- Improved adding and removing applications from iusethis profile
Note: The underlying data model of AppFresh has changed significantly from previous versions. If you updated from an older version and experience any problems, please try cleaning the ~/Library/Application Support/AppFresh folder and restart AppFresh.
Posted in AppFresh | 23 Comments »
