Clarity Consulting’s Windows Phone 7 Bus Tracker App

Man I love when these guys work on something because they really think through their development. They admit that they already saw the bus tracking WP7 app and that’s why they’re releasing a demo of theirs. Early competition for a phone that doesn’t even exist:) Anyway, here’s their version that was built for CTA and BART (San Fran’s mass transit agency).

With the all the hype of the WP7 platform our engineers have been pumping out some really cool stuff.  Several months ago, the CTA released an official API. Some of our developers went to work, and we find ourselves in the “design last” approach. Below is a video showing an early release of a bus tracker proof of concept. In the following posts I’ll walk through the process of transforming this functional application into a WP7 app and how we meld in the Metro design, information architecture, usability concepts, etc.

Key Features

Some features we’ve been kicking around that will hopefully find their way into the final release of the app:

• View all routes, or routes near your current location using WP7’s location API
• Glance-view live tiles for saved stops arrival times (stops you use frequently)
• “My Ends” – Find your way to a destination. Choosing “home” will find the nearest stop to your current location and find the fastest bus route(s) to your destination.
• Ability to show all stops, or stops nearest you
• Traffic and Transit alerts
• A Compass to help you orient yourself

There’s more to come as Clarity is going to explain why WP7 is the best platform for this bus tracker. You can read more about it here.