Meet-up 2

Date & Time

• 20 October 2010
• 20:30

Location

• Hackerspace Ghent: Blekerijstraat 75 Gent, room 1.21
•  http://0x20.be/

Attendees

1. Yeri Tiete
2. Tim Besard
3. Louis Dedecker
4. Pieter Colpaert
5. Pieter De Baets

Report

Original agenda:

• 20:30 -  iRail: our plans to promote iRail and how you can help! (Presentation by Pieter and Yeri)
• 21:00 - BeTrains, guidelines and milestones: how to become an official iRail app (by Christophe or Louis or Pieter)
• 21:15 - Showcase of BeTrains for iPhone (by Louis)
• 21:30 - Showcase of BeTrains for Qt (by Tim Besard)
• 21:45 - Picture moment
• 22:00 - API v1.0 Draft 1 month in - What's good/bad about it - Discussion (by Pieter)
• 23:00 - Code!

As a lot of people were sick, were excused or were experiencing traffic problems (the team really should learn how to use public transport ) we started late and we did not respect the schedule at all. Louis de Decker started of by showing the BeTrains for iPhone application. It looked great and user-friendly. It already shows the right train information and even implements the same chat-with-people-on-your-train functionality like BeTrains for Android. I hope he will reply on this e-mail with some screenshots. We were unanimously excited about his progress and we hope to see more soon. We expect an official release before the end of this year.

The second presentation was held by me (Pieter). Points worth mentioning:

• We got a new logo for both BeTrains and iRail! Thanks to Olivier Guiard who joined the iRail team
• We need more design people. Our design atm is not one to be very proud of. To be fairly honest, it’s ugly. Think you can do better? Think you know someone who can do better?
• We got a proof of concept with jquery mobile here:  http://dev.iRail.be/jq
• We lack PHP developers! Are you interested in helping out on the API? Please contact me as we still have quite some work on that.
• We want more users!
• Qr code campaign: We’ll distribute stickers (probably give the maway for free) which you can scan with a smartphone and retrieve the information of the station you’re close to. You can put these stickers on your bag, on your train subscription, …
• We want more developers who use the API
• We’re going to do a developers challenge sponsored by X: the most creative work wins. No rules, no limitations.
• We want other people to blog about us. Blogging about ourselves again leads to the same people reading the same things over and over again. We will be happy to do phone-interviews with anyone and we will be happy to answer any question
• We might start an non profit organization to back our project. This way we can legally accept tasks from other companies and we can accept donations/investments. We got some offers which we might accept to implement and optimize public transport site plugins.

The third and last talk was about BeTrains for QT (= maemo, symbian, meego, …). Tim Besard is doing an awesome job. His approach is at this moment to first write a very good back-end (something that accepts requests and talk with the API). Writing front-ends is another specialty. He could show us a 0.1 version of a maemo front-end which was quite nice and promising. We will implement a chat-system, like in other BeTrains apps as well. We hope Tim will post some screenshots for the rest of the world. Recently we started development on a samsung version of BeTrains: BeTrains for Bada. If you have a bada-phone let us know and we’ll keep you informed as a test-user.

The last subject of the evening was discussing the iRail API after we released the new draft one month ago. We came up with this:

• A demand for JSON output. This is no problem and I will implement this asap. (=ticket #29)
• Need for a unique Id for a station. At this moment it is not clear whether Gent Sint Pieters, Gent SP, … are in fact the same stations and it’s hard for a client developer to know that. Therefor we will link all stations with a unique Id. This Id will be similarly constructed like the Id of vehicles, for example: Be.NMBS.Station.123* We need liveboards! (Arrival/Depart? boards)
• As we are excited about the chat functionality of the BeTrains applications we will adopt this in our official API soon. It will be at api.iRail.be/chat
• For the xml part it would be nice to have XSD’s
• When doing xml API request I want to see some eye-candy. Please implement an XSLT
• Porting the API to the Netherlands is easy. Why not do it since wehave iRail.nl? As our iPhone app will be free we can be an alternativefor the proprietary dutch iPhone app that costs X€.

Misc

• We need to make a clear distinctions between people who actually use the API and people who develop the API.
•  BeTrains.com will be directed to our servers and there will be a BeTrains .com/.mobi site soon.
• We need to be more visible on facebook
•  http://project.iRail.be is not sexy at all. Is there a way to change the theme of a trac?
• To have more visibility we should create a good drupal and wordpress plugin. A lot of people us those systems and it would be awesome to see people using it to find the best public transport way to get at their location.
• We will provide a demo widget soon
• Next meeting will (probably) be in Hackerspace Brussels