[iRail] Fwd: Preview of OpenTrainTimes Beta

Mon Sep 24 11:45:39 UTC 2012

Hello Peter,

first of all, congratulations on your effort to facilitate commuting in the
UK! The concept seems really well thought out and extensive. I'm sure it'll
be a great success when it launches. :-)

However, as a front-end developer and designer I couldn't help but notice
some slight areas of improvement (and by slight I really do mean slight):

   - I'd suggest representing time with a colon, separating hours and
   minutes. This makes it a lot more pleasant to read.
   - When inputting the departure/destination, it starts suggesting
   locations when you enter 4 letters or more. If you cut this down to 3,
   it'll be slightly easier to use: when people type "lon" they (should) only
   use one hand since those three letters are really close together on the
   keyboard. If they have to add a "d" to view all London stations, they'll
   have to either move their hand or use their left one. It's probably a
   really small detail, but I thought I'd mention it nonetheless.
   - Desktop: when viewing the map, it "bounces" you back up to the top
   area when you try to pan down a little. This is normal since the other
   tiles aren't drawn and you don't want people to go there, but there's still
   a pretty big area that is drawn in the south which can be viewer. When you
   pan too far down, it bounces you back up. This results in having to scroll
   the page if you want to look at London, for example. It seems to me that
   people are more prone to panning the map first when viewing the page,
   rather than scrolling. For reference, the resolution on my laptop is
   1366*768. You can find an attachment (desktop_map.png) explaining the issue
   visually. I'm not sure if this is something you can fix, or if it's just a
   Leaflet thing.
   - Mobile (and by extension *really* small desktop windows): the
   navigation buttons collapse into eachother on small screen sizes.
   See mobile_buttons.png
   - Again for mobile & small desktop windows: the map height isn't
   adjusted properly, resulting in a really thin but long map that can't be
   displayed fully in the window (see mobile_map_1.png & mobile_map_2.png).
   This results from the map element having a constant height in the inline
   CSS:
   <div id="map" style="height: 720px; border: 1px solid black; position:
   relative; " class=" leaflet-container leaflet-fade-anim">

Like I said, these are really minute details which I happened to notice.
Hope this helps you out a bit!

PS: sorry for the wall of text!

Kind regards,

Thomas

2012/9/24 Pieter Colpaert <pieter at irail.be>

> Hi all,
>
> I'm not sure if you've got the news that we are going to work more
> extensively together on an international level. In the end, we are
> creating very similar user interfaces all the time using the same data,
> only from another country. Be sure to check-out http://hello.iRail.be.
>
> Hereafter you'll find a mail by Peter Hicks. He's launching a new
> version of his website opentraintimes soon. It's basically iRail.be, but
> for the UK. Can you help him with some feedback?
>
> Peter: I hope you can handle a bit of criticism. After all, our club
> contains the heartlessest critics of Belgium.
>
> Thank you all in advance,
>
> Pieter
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject:        Preview of OpenTrainTimes Beta
> Date:   Mon, 24 Sep 2012 08:20:19 +0100
> From:   Peter Hicks <peter.hicks at poggs.co.uk>
> To:     opentraintimes-info at poggs.co.uk
>
>
>
> All,
>
> Assuming there are no last-minute hitches, I'm aiming to launch the
> redesigned OpenTrainTimes on 1st October, with the beta site being
> available for preview from Thursday/Friday.
>
> I still have some bugs and compatibility issues to fix (having spent
> most of Sunday making the maps work on Internet Explorer!), but if you'd
> like an early glimpse, please check out http://beta.opentraintimes.com/.
>  I'm happy for you to circulate it within your respective organisation
> as long as you feed back any comments to me.
>
> I have fixed the apparently multi-SPADded signals at Northampton issue,
> but there are still a couple of things outstanding:
>
>   * When loading track diagrams, sometimes the data won't load
>     initially.  Refresh the page and the berths should load
>   * The TD feed data appears to have slowed down to a crawl now (not
>     sure if it's a problem on my side or not), so today I'm using data
>     straight from the ESG platform (freight trains will disappear
>     magically later today)
>   * VSTP trains aren't included yet, but that's planned
>   * Some of the maps aren't complete because I ran out of time when
>     drawing them, so there will be things like berths that don't update,
>     etc.
>
> There's a list as long as my arm of things I want to add, including the
> much-anticipated "moving blobs on maps", which is still under
> development and will hopefully be done in the next month or two.
>
> Please let me know your comments.
>
> Kind regards,
>
>
> Peter
>
> --
> Peter Hicks  |  OpenTrainTimes  |  t: 020 3095 2600  |  m: 07970 476447
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> iRail mailing list
> iRail at list.irail.be
> http://lists.rootspirit.com/mailman/listinfo/irail
>
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