RateCityRail

Dear All,

I must really apologise for the lack of posts lately. Usual excuses, I’m totally flat out at work at the moment and busy moving houses.

Never fear though, I’m still catching 2 to 4 trains a day.

This story took the cake though and I had to comment.

Alvin Singh a software developer has created a program for the iPhone called “Transit Sydney” which he sells on iTunes for $2.49 per copy. There aren’t many downloads at the moment, but I see huge potential for an application like this. (see image inset)

It seems that Railcorp have secretly been planning their own iPhone application, eek. and that they are trying to force Mr Singh to remove his application on the grounds of copyright infringements as Railcorp have copyright to their timetable.

Now, fair enough on the copyright issue, but surely this is one of those applications where “it’s for the greater good”. I know for a fact that there are usually only 4 or so timetables per platform, sometimes on smaller stations there are only 2 or 1! Usually there is someone’s head in the way, or a speaker or your glasses perscription just isn’t strong enough. An application like this would give you the next train(roughly) at a glance.

What would be really cool, would be if Railcorp had a web front end for all their timetables and put this live data online. The technology is there, and honestly, it’s not that hard.

Is Railcorp afraid that people will suddenly realise just how late their trains are running, and now matter if they change on time trains to > 10mins late that they will still have poor performance levels on some lines?

Anyway I think this is a huge over reaction on Railcorps part and this gentleman should be allow to keep selling his product.

I’ll keep an eye on this one.

Image source : www.smh.com.au

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Cityrail, Meta.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.