I have always wanted to develop some mobile application, but somehow always had no time for it.

As I work and live in Fribourg, I use public transport on a daily basis to go to my work, and unfortunately I have problems with remembering the schedule of the buses. Moreover, I often leave work at different times, that makes remembering this informating even more challenging :) The only thing one can do is to print an A4 paper with the schedule, but again, it is really inconvenient to use it.

So I decided to create an application that will show how much time is left till the next bust at the bus stops. I immediately fired up with this idea and decided not to postpone it for a long time and try to write a small prototype. Since I don’t know Objective C and have not developed in Java for years, but have a good knowledge of HTML/Javascript, my choice fell on a cross-platform framework called PhoneGap, which I have heard many positive reviews about.

Very quickly I have found a great book from O’Reilly, that at this moment is available for free inside their Open Feedback Publishing System: Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Among other libraries, they also used jQTouch, that I also found really nice, though it is primarily focused on the iPhone users.

After nearly week of work in the evenings, I have finally created the working prototype:

You can access it at: /tpf/

The only bad thing about it is that the schedule data is not available online, that makes this app somewhat unusable (I’ve only added 3 bus stops that are important to me). But as I work at the University of Fribourg, we will try to speak with the people from TPF to make this data available.