I take the commuter train to work every weekday. It’s great; comes and goes pretty often, and it’s quite comfortable (as long as you get a seat.) Their website (french), however, is a complete debacle. But, I digress.
If you recall, I mentioned that I bought an iPod Touch on my trip to New York City. So now thus equipped, I thought I’d make use of the Photos application, and put together some train schedules that I can refer to on the go.
After a bit of time in Photoshop, and a hefty dose of Helvetica, I finally had what I needed.
So far it’s working out great. The darkened region highlights the trains that I usually catch on a normal work day.
Here are some shots of the schedule in action:
Now the question is, what else should I do?
14 Comments
Sweet! I am totally copying this idea for my phone! Of course, my screen isn’t as big and probably not as high resolution, but I might be able to pull it off.
I’ll need bus times as well – last night I got to the bus stop 5 minutes after one bus, 30 min before the next one and then when that one came there were so many people I couldn’t get on and had to get a taxi!
Umm, have you checked out your website on your phone? (I haven’t looked, it might work perfectly well.) Perhaps if you’re keen on CSS you could create a stylesheet for small screens?
Wow, that’s pretty sexy. Nice work!
Beautiful. It would be great if these showed train status, system delays, travel advisories, etc. But I love the look.
i’m not sure what this thing does… but i guess is that it checks the current time, and displays the “next few trains” suitable for you?
Gray, it’s not software. They’re just images. You look at them and figure out what train you need to catch. Handy when you have to stay back at work, or if you’re feeling sick and need to go home early, but there’s no point leaving work unless there’s a train to take you home. It’s easy to remember the times of the trains you always get, but you can’t memorise the whole timetable.
Gray
Yeah, like Krista said, this is purely hand made, it’s just an image loaded into the iPod Touch’s photos app. I’d love to have a script or program to pull the data (in case it changed… or something) — but this works fine for now.
Haha, dude that looks awesome! I do not have an iPhone, sadly, because Sprint rules over AT&Cheat, but I do love the high res looks of the iPhone, makes this look gorgeous. Really brings out the gradients that you used, really simple, sleek, and useful. Can’t get much better than that right!?
Patrick
Thanks mate! Yeah the iPod Touch/iPhone is perfect for stuff like this — It’s a great time to be a designer ;)
It’s amazing the excuses we find to create stuff! LOL!!! Great idea!
Karinne
Haha, yes indeed! I’m addicted to design, what can I say.
This is a great idea. We don’t really have a regular bus system where I live, but this would really work for setting up normal schedules or even just putting a high resolution map of the city together.
Nice shot of the iPhone!
This is a great idea. I’m *so* copying it for my iPhone. And this despite there being a pretty good online timetable lookup here in the UK; why waste time going online every time when the timetable hardly ever changes?
Thanks for the comments everyone!
Will
Feel free to copy it all you like, share and enjoy I like to say :)
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[…] made a nice train timetable for viewing on his iPhone. I can totally relate to its usefulness, since I’ve been known to […]