Project News
Fri, 19 Feb 2010
iPhone users will appreciate a new (beta) feature quietly rolled out a few weeks ago. When you save a route or stop as a home screen bookmark, its icon will display your chosen route number and direction, making for quick visual access to your saved stop.
More TCTransit screenshots are available in this Flickr photo set.
Sun, 3 Jan 2010
Julio Ojeda-Zapata recently highlighted this project in his article about transit applications available to those of us in the Twin Cities. This list is certainly exciting, and points out the efforts of not only Metro Transit (providing NexTrip and GTFS data), but other developers such as Andy Atkinson, creator of Train Brain.
“Put down the bus schedule, pick up your phone”
http://www.twincities.com/ci_14108478
Tech Weblog: Metro Transit information is finally getting mobile-friendly
http://bit.ly/7fOzZb
It will be exciting to see what offerings come along in 2010!
Sun, 13 Dec 2009
The front-end of TCTransit.mobi makes use of a few simple enhancements that improve load time for mobile users. The results of each optimization are rather surprising. If you’re working on your own mobile web application, it’s worth the extra effort to include a few optimizations, such as these:
1. Gzipped Assets.
All HTML and CSS automatically Gzipped by the web server. This provides a tremendous gain in load times.
2. “Minified” CSS.
In addition to being gzipped, CSS assets are slimmed down.
3. “Minified” HTML output.
All HTML is dynamically stripped of whitespace, comments, and other clutter, and served in fewer lines. You’d be surprised that this shaves off a few more kilobytes on larger pages.
4. Cut down on image requests.
The few images that are used on this site are base64-encoded and embedded in the CSS code, omitting extra HTTP requests.
The back-end is served by a combination of PHP, Memcached, and Nginx. The three work together to provide a snappy front-end, bringing you quicker load times.
For more information on making your site faster, check out Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site.
There are definitely more optimizations I could make, but my forthcoming efforts will target new features.
Sun, 6 Dec 2009
I’ve been taking a number of steps to shave off stray kilobytes from each page load, as every single one counts on mobile networks. Until recently, Google Analytics added quite a bit of weight to each page load, not only in the 10k for its Javascript (gzipped), but additional http requests. TCTransit.mobi has replaced its Javascript tracking code with Google’s newer pixel-based mobile version, which is only 0.03K, and fewer HTTP requests. Score!
Desktop browsers will load the Javascript version of Google Analytics. Mobile browsers will load the pixel-based mobile version.
While some might not find this to be earth-shattering news, it definitely makes a difference. Kudos to the Analytics team for finally providing a solution for mobile applications.
Wed, 4 Nov 2009
The site has received a few client-side improvements to deliver your transit times a few milliseconds faster. I frequently access
tctransit.mobi via the slower T-Mobile EDGE network, so quite a bit of unnecessary fluff has been omitted from the site, including images and javascript (with the exception of Google Analytics).