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Software Reviews:
Sydney
Morning Herald - Icon (31/1/04):
The
PDA Guy
(31/1/04):
Catch that Train -
Sydney Trains for the
Palm and Pocket PC
Posted on: Sunday
16th of
May 2004 At: 09:31 PM
I know that many of you are public transport commuters just like me.
Each morning I trudge up the hill from my home and catch a bus to the
station and then a train into the city. If I was in Sydney I'd be able
to use Sydney Trains.
As the name suggest, Sydney trains is an application for Pocket PC and
Palm devices that provides a full timetable of all trains running in
Sydney. It lets you select a starting station, destination and
approximate travel time. Then it'll tell you what trains will be
running from the starting point of your journey and the arrival time at
your jaunt's end point. Very slick!
As far as clever, efficient programming goes, Sydney Trains is
brilliant. When you run through the installation, it will connect to
the Sydney train system web site and download the entire timetable for
every train and station. It will then "crunch" this data into a very
tight database. All up, the entire installation is under a megabyte of
space. That's pretty incredible when you think of all the data. The
downside of this is that you'll need an Internet connection during
installation as the installer downloads the most current timetable it
can.
The
program itself is easy to use and very quick. In fact, it's far more
reliable than the train system. On the downside though, only Sydney is
supported so users in other parts of Australia will need to wait for a
localised version. Also, if you are taking a trip that requires that
you change train at some point, the software does not help you out.
You'll need to map the route out yourself. With some route planning
intelligence, this sort of application could be a killer.
Sydney Trains
for Palm handhelds and PocketPC
is sold over the web at Espace.
It's also in a few retail shops such as Dymocks, Harvey Norman
– MLC Centre, Myer George St and Harris Technology. It
costs $34.95.
If you're a regular train traveller that needs to be able to catch
trains from different locations regularly, this could be a great help.
I'm crossing my fingers for versions that support other cities.(source:
The PDA Guy
http://www.thepdaguy.com)
MY
Palm Life:
At last
some Australian Specific
Software [Software] — Posted
by Rick @ 05:22 (GMT)
Need to know
when the next train leaves from Sydney stations, then this is the app
for you. Sydney Trains provides timetable information for Cityrail
trains running on the Sydney, Wollongong, and Newcastle networks.
Timetable information can easily be updated from Cityrails website.
Using this software you’ll never be late for that train
again…..well thats what I thought but as a colleage here at
work said…it won’t help you catch a train on time
(because Cityrail wouldn’t know what a timetable was even if
they tripped over it), what it will do is let you calculate precisely
how late the train is while your huddled together on the station
platform with nothing better to do.
STOP Press:
Garry at work has just told me that Sydney Trains can also be bundled
with Pipe Crazy.
This is a game you can play while your waiting for your train to
arrive. Nice one….the marketing guys down there have
obviously used the Cityrail network before
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