I wrote an app for my G1 to get information from the real-time MBTA bus location feed and display it in Google Maps as bus icons. It was an interesting experience to develop for.

The Android eclipse environment has its fair share of hiccups unfortunately, simple things like how a down arrow usually behaves, or not being able to scroll all the way to the bottom of a list using your mouse scrollwheel. The emulator and eclipse’s debugging capabilities were really helpful, and robust for the most part. The most difficult thing in developing for it was figuring out how to do what I wanted to do, what functions and classes to use. I guess that’s inherent in developing for a new platform.

The app is pretty simple. It’s one screen, with most of it taken up by Google Maps and a bar at the top containing space for a refresh button and a status update box. It defaults to Watertown square when it starts, although that could easily be changed to use GPS or something else. When the app starts and when the refresh button is pushed, it retrieves a list of bus locations from the feed XML. Those locations are sorted by distance to get the 20 closest buses to where the center of the map is. (The distance is currently computed by sqrt(latitude^2 + longitude^2). This is slightly incorrect since a difference in latitude may be smaller or larger than a difference in longitude. I’ll fix that soon using this. Overlays are then created using a bus picture I got from Wikipedia and inserted into Google Maps. Continue reading MBTA Bus Locator →