Last week was about getting back to work on the android app – again. So was the week before but it didn’t happen, this week it did.
You can’t see much of a difference between the last screenshots and the ones from today but a lot has happened under the surface. Showing the nearest stops is a lot faster and you don’t just get the top 100 stops, you get a list of all stops ordered by distance that you can scroll through. Is that useful? Not really. But it does mean that the infrastructure for that kind of thing is in place which actually took a lot of work. Also, the new implementation can be tested. Before, if I messed up and broke the list nothing would happen. Now I can test that everything looks right and if it breaks alarms will automatically go off.
I also spent some time trying to compress the schedules even more. I’d noticed that the names of stops and routes have a lot of overlap. For instance, the word Kommune appears again and again. I played around with replacing common words with a much shorter code and then, when I wanted to display the string swap the longer word back in place of the code so you can’t tell it had happened. It didn’t make enough of a difference to be worth the effort. Whether I manually compress the data or not it gets zipped afterwards and the manual pre-compression only gave a few percent improvement.
This week I’ll work towards making it such that if you press a stop it shows you routes that visit that stop. I may also spend some more time on getting your current location and possible the look of the entries in the list of stops.
