[iRail] Second iRail meeting - Report & Community updates

Thu Oct 21 21:10:44 UTC 2010

Hello dear list.

Seem to be a great meeting. Not a lot of people, but great mind! Quality 
is better than quantity.

So I would be excited too to see all screenshots (QT and iOS)! Feel free 
to send them ASAP, we are all curious.

A few feedback about your report:

* jqmobile is awesome!

* I think that for the QRCode, we need also a simple webpage with a 
great UI to tell people what we are doing ( a lot of pictures and design 
is better than words)

* facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/BETrains/238334902800?ref=ts

* Olivier is really skilled and a great guy too. Glad to see him un the Team

* *IMPORTANT* for the stations ID: 
http://www.railtime.be/website/StationDataScript.ashx
I strongly suggest to use this one because we will need it for the next 
API step: station info ( and train info):
The station ID is really important for some request: 
http://www.railtime.be/mobile/SearchStation.aspx?l=FR&s=1&sid=/_*102*_/&tr=17:00-60&da=D&p=2
I use this one and I don't want to use an other ID apart from the NMBS one.

* I have received the 3 Bada phones that I wil generously offer to 3 
dev's. I really hope that I can trust them!
I get nothing for me and my only wish is that they keep the Android UI ( 
like all apps, while respecting your guidelines, of course)

Cheers and Hope to see you soon.

Pieter Colpaert wrote:
> 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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