HZbostonsubway

This app displays when trains will arrive at the subway stations' platforms. This application allows you to see many stations rail prediction information in one scrollable window. You can view all the stations in the system, or just the stations in one rail line.

Currently MBTA only provides this information for the Red, Blue, and Orange lines.

Information displayed includes:
o Trip number. This uniquely identifies a train's trip so one can look at many stations and see how long one's trip is predicted to take.
o Line - including branch information
o Minutes - how many minutes until the train will arrive at the platform. "ARR" is displayed if the train will arrive in under one minute. "BRD" is displayed when the train has already arrived at the platform.


Features:

1. The capability to see many station's rail predictions at once. The default starting screen shows you every station in the MBTA Metro subway system along with all its rail prediction signs in a scrollable window. You can also select to see only transfer stations or only one rail line – for example the blue line. When watching one rail line the stations are not in alphabetic order, but instead are in the real station order of that line.

2. The capability to select the data updating rate. The default rate is 60 seconds and can be lowered as low as 20 seconds.

3. The capability to automatically recover from an internet outage. Sometimes when I enter rail tunnels my Verizon Droid-X loses its 3G internet connection. This application will not bother you with any error messages. There is no need to click on anything to try again. The indicator on the top line of the phone shows there is no 3G internet connection, and the data being displayed by the application shows the time the rail prediction data was retrieved from the MBTA web server. Thus you can see how stale the rail predictions are. When your phone again gets an internet connection, this app will automatically try to get the rail prediction data from the MBTA web server.

4. When this app runs in the background it temporarily stops updating the rail prediction information to conserve data downloading. This means when you press the HOME button updating of the rail predictions will cease until such time that you press this app’s icon to resume its operation.

5. When the phone’s power button is pressed to place it into sleep mode, or the phone’s “Screen timeout” is reached, then this app will cease updating the rail predictions to conserve data downloading.

6. If you tap on the display it will change from black background with white text to become white background with black text. Just tap and see which you prefer.

7. This app is the closest one can get to a real-time display of the MBTA rail system.