[iRail] Second iRail meeting - Report & Community updates

Thu Oct 21 16:11:21 UTC 2010

Dear list,

first of all I want to thank all people who attended the meeting. We got
some really interesting input and we were able to announce and discuss
some future perspectives.

iRail meeting 2:
20:30 - 24:00
Attendees: Yeri Tiete, Tim Besard, Louis Dedecker, Pieter Colpaert,
Pieter De Baets

As a lot of people were sick, were excused or were experiencing traffic
problems (the team really should learn how to use public transport ;-) )
we started late and we did not respect the schedule at all. Louis
Dedecker started of by showing the BeTrains for iPhone application. It
looked great and user-friendly. It already shows the right train
information and even implements the same chat-with-people-on-your-train
functionality like BeTrains for Android. I hope he will reply on this
e-mail with some screenshots. We were unanimously excited about his
progress and we hope to see more soon. We expect an official release
before the end of this year.

The second presentation was held by me (Pieter) and the slides are
attached to this e-mail. Points worth mentioning:
 * We got a new logo for both BeTrains and iRail! Thanks to Olivier
Guiard who joined the iRail team
 * We need more design people. Our design atm is not one to be very
proud of. To be fairly honest, it's ugly. Think you can do better? Think
you know someone who can do better?
 * We got a proof of concept with jquery mobile
here:http://dev.iRail.be/jq
 * We lack PHP developers! Are you interested in helping out on the API?
Please contact me as we still have quite some work on that.
 * We want more users!   
	→ Qr code campaign: We'll distribute stickers (probably give the maway
for free) which you can scan with a smartphone and retrieve the
information of the station you're close to. You can put these stickers
on your bag, on your train subscription, ...
 * We want more developers who use the API   
	→ We're going to do a developers challenge sponsored by X: the most
creative work wins. No rules, no limitations.
 * We want other people to blog about us. Blogging about ourselves again
leads to the same people reading the same things over and over again. We
will be happy to do phone-interviews with anyone and we will be happy to
answer any question
 * We might start an non profit organization to back our project. This
way we can legally accept tasks from other companies and we can accept
donations/investments. We got some offers which we might accept to
implement and optimize public transport site plugins.

The third and last talk was about BeTrains for QT (=maemo, symbian,
meego, ...). Tim Besard is doing an awesome job. His approach is at this
moment to first write a very good back-end (something that accepts
requests and talk with the API). Writing front-ends is another
specialty. He could show us a 0.1 version of a maemo front-end which was
quite nice and promising. We will implement a chat-system, like in other
BeTrains apps as well. We hope Tim will post some screenshots for the
rest of the world. Recently we started development on a samsung version
of BeTrains: BeTrains for Bada. If you have a bada-phone let us know and
we'll keep you informed as a test-user.

The last subject of the evening was discussing the iRail API after we
released the new draft one month ago. We came up with this:
 * A demand for JSON output. This is no problem and I will implement
this asap. (=ticket #29)
 * Need for a unique Id for a station. At this moment it is not clear
whether Gent Sint Pieters, Gent SP, ... are in fact the same stations
and it's hard for a client developer to know that. Therefor we will link
all stations with a unique Id. This Id will be similarly constructed
like the Id of vehicles, for example: Be.NMBS.Station.123* We need
liveboards! (Arrival/Depart boards)
 * As we are excited about the chat functionality of the BeTrains
applications we will adopt this in our official API soon. It will be at
api.iRail.be/chat
 * For the xml part it would be nice to have XSD's
 * When doing xml API request I want to see some eye-candy. Please
implement an XSLT
 * Porting the API to the Netherlands is easy. Why not do it since
wehave iRail.nl? As our iPhone app will be free we can be an
alternativefor the proprietary dutch iPhone app that costs X€.

Misc

 * We need to make a clear distinctions between people who actually use
the API and people who develop the API.
 * BeTrains.com will be directed to our servers and there will be a
BeTrains .com/.mobi site soon.
 * We need to be more visible on facebook
 * http://project.iRail.be is not sexy at all. Is there a way to change
the theme of a trac?
 * To have more visibility we should create a good drupal and wordpress
plugin. A lot of people us those systems and it would be awesome to see
people using it to find the best public transport way to get at their
location.
 * We will provide a demo widget soon
 * Next meeting will (probably) be in Hackerspace Brussels

Yours sincerely,

Pieter Colpaert

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