Notices

Hi all,

I have started programming Quando Parte, an application to check departures and arrivals from Italian train stations. It is still quite preliminary, and basically works only for me at this time, but I plan to use the location services to quickly find nearby stations, and to obtain station data from openstreetmaps.

I have started the application because I find it useful to check if there are delays or suppressions before leaving home (or the office), but I also plan to use it to dip my toes in Maemo (and Meego, I hope) programming. As an incentive to work on it, I have subscribed it to the meego competition. Check it out, it is here:

http://competition.meetmeego.org/submissions/15

and let me know if you like it.

Thanks for the app, that I'm going to test asap. Any plan to include a journey search engine based on trenitalia data?

Thank you, but do not expect too much from it yet. I have the station display done, but the station list is very short... and sorting and location is not implemented yet.

As for journey search, I was not planning on doing that, but I am open to suggestions. It should not be difficult, though; the web application has a link for that.

The initial motivation for Quando Parte was that the web application was clunky to use from a phone, and it uses post for the query, so I could not bookmark the stations I was most interested into.

My main use case is starting it to see the trains leaving the station in the next hour or so, or if there are delays. So it would immediately show the last station selected on startup, with an option to change it.

I've tested the app, is very preliminary but look promising.

At moment i can see only Genova stations, will be nice if is possibile to select others italian stations, even without gps.

Good work anyway.

Thank you for the encouraging words; I plan to add all the Italian stations as my next step, and filtering and distance sorting afterwards.

It is very much work in progress at the moment, I am afraid.

are you aware of Fahrplan? maybe some bits of it might be useful for your project...

You should have called it "Ma Quando Parte" or "Ma quando arriva"

Good work though, hope you'll complete it soon.

I did not, thanks for the suggestion.

It is a very nice program, but it is complementary to what I am trying to do. It even seem to find train schedules for Italian trains, even when using the german data, which is very nice. Maybe there could be some synergy (like a data backend for Trenitalia), but it is a bit early to tell.
I will have a closer look at it, though.

I think you are right... that's actually what pushed me over to start the project. A more apt name would be "Parte? Ma quando parte?" but that may be a bit long... :-D

(For those who not speak Italian, "Quando Parte" means "When is it leaving", referred to the train, in this case; "Ma quando parte" may be liberally translated as "Is it leaving, already?" instead.)

Well, I'm not likely to do any more work on it this weekend, so I have done another snapshot today.
A new version is avaliable at the project page (http://competition.meetmeego.org/submissions/15).

I hoped to be further ahead, but obtaining the list of stations is harder than I hoped. I managed to generate a short list from openstreetmap data, however, so I'll have a better version soon.

This version has an Italian translation of the gui, station list filtering, and a few more stations included.

I have a few packaging problems, I'd gladly accept some help about:

I tried putting it in the user/navigation category, but the application always show up in other.

I have drawn an application icon and encoded for the control file, but it does not show up anymore. It used to work...