I’ve been playing around with the OC Transpo Live Next Bus Arrival Data Feed API and built a simple little mobile web site that will tell you when the next bus is coming for your stop. Check it out: OC Me
Simply enter a stop number and click Get Routes, or if you have geolocation enabled on your mobile device, you can find a stop close to you on a map. The application will get live GPS and schedule data from OC Transpo, and tell you which buses are coming soon, with an estimated arrival time.
This was all built in JQuery Mobile, and has only been tested to work on my iPhone 4. I have no idea how well it works on other platforms. On the backend it’s PHP, and I’ve written some xml-caching functions so I don’t overload my API calls to the Live Data Feed API. The app is mostly bilingual, but the current translation is probably pretty bad (I have a translator girlfriend who promises she’ll help me fix it up at some point soon).
No doubt there are plenty of other bus tracker apps out there for OC Transpo, including their own official iOS app, and many of them have far more features than I intend to build into mine. I built this mostly as a personal proof-of-concept project, but I figured I’d throw it out there for others to see anyway.
I will post the code to GitHub soon in case anyone wants to see how it was built and perhaps build one of their own.