Hello Riders,

This release took longer than expected, mostly because I kept adding stuff to it. But, I think it’s worth the wait! OneBusAway 17.4.0 adds alarms to tell you when your bus is a certain number of minutes away, a new search experience, and a huge amount of polish.

The newest features include:

Map

• See the direction you’re pointing in on the map
• New search experience (Check it out, it’s way better!)
• New icons
• Toggle between standard map and hybrid satellite views
• Quickly access nearby stops from the toolbar butons on the map

Regional Alerts

I want to give a huge thank you to Ben, who designed and built out the backend system that this new feature relies on. His expertise was invaluable in making this happen. <3

• When a serious issue happens with the bus system, you’ll receive an alert as soon as you open the app that gives you more information about it. This way, you’ll never get caught off guard by salmon trucks or snow days again.
  • Please note: I am currently manually adding this data to the system, so early morning commuters might not get to take advantage of it. Just a head’s up.
    You can view more alerts from the Info tab. These are things like one-off cancellations of routes.

Alarms

• Set an alarm for a particular bus and get a push notification on your iPhone or Apple Watch when your bus is your specified number of minutes away.
  • View your active alarms on the ‘Recent’ tab

Stops

• Tap on a ‘…’ button to access bookmarking, trip sharing, and alarms.
• Move walking distance and time into the stops table so you can see exactly which buses you’ll be able to catch.

Trip Sharing

• Better behavior on copying the URL
• Trip sharing should work properly in Tampa again

Inter-app communication

• onebusaway:// URLs will now launch OneBusAway

Bookmarks

• Fixes bug with bookmark name editing (Thanks, Alan!)
• Sort bookmarks by proximity to your current location

Handoff

• Adds Handoff support for working with OBA across different devices

Other changes

A huge “thank you” to Edgar, who continues to volunteer his time to localize OneBusAway into Spanish.

• Lots of behind-the-scenes upgrades to OBA, including model and networking layers.
• Upgrade third party libraries (thanks for your help with this, Victor)

 

Additionally, in Puget Sound only for now, you’ll be able to get alerts about major failures in the bus system, like when an overturned fish truck snarls the evening commute! Hey transit agencies, feel free to get in touch with me about adding your data to this new system.

<3,
Aaron