Today, I released the first major update to Singapore Transit since it hit v2.0.
Since that release, I’ve solicited feedback on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. Two major requests have surfaced:
Themes
Siri integration for a specific service at a specific stop
v2.1 deals with the latter. You can now add a Siri Shortcut to request arrival information for a particular service at a selected bus stop.1
In addition, since v2.02, I’ve renamed the app from SG Transit to Singapore Transit. It makes it easier for non-Singapore residents to find on the App Store and, I’m pleased to announce, it ties in nicely with my next project, London Transit (coming 2019).
Google has updated its Assistant app for iOS to support Siri Shortcuts, enabling users to invoke Google’s virtual assistant using Apple’s virtual assistant, without even having to launch the app.
At the end of August, I started rewriting SG Transit with the following goals:
Better Performance
Siri Integration
Apple Watch Support
As I progressed, the following goals were added:
Rich Notifications
New UI
Additional LTA Data Mall API Functionality
All of this is now available in v2.0.0, which was released today.
Better Performance
SG Transit now uses Core Data instead of parsing large amounts of JSON each time the app is launched. This has improved performance of nearby bus stops, bus arrivals, and bus routes.
Siri Integration
SG Transit integrates deeply with Siri. You can add any bus stop to Siri, using your own voice command, ask Siri for the latest arrivals at that stop, and the results will be presented by Siri without opening the app.
Similarly, if you regularly check a bus stop at a particular time of day, Siri will learn about this behaviour and surface this as a suggestion to you via the lock screen.
Apple Watch Support
SG Transit Mini — SG Transit’s little brother — supports bus arrivals either using nearby stops or favourite stops. More features will come in future releases.
Rich Notifications
MRT & LRT service alerts and traffic alerts are delivered to the app as rich notifications. Simply pull down on the notification to see details like traffic incident locations.
Traffic notifications are configured by type (e.g. Heavy Traffic) and time (e.g. Afternoon 12:00 - 17:59).
New UI
The look-and-feel of the app (and icon) is completely new. It’s minimalist. but at the same time shows more information. For example, in v1 you could only see the the wheelchair, load, and bus type of the next bus, but in v2 you can see this information for the next three arrivals.
The tab bar has also seen some small changes with the introduction of haptics, animations, and, well, the removal of text.
Finally, you may have noticed from the screenshots above that the app has a brand new typeface: Hermes Maia.
Additional LTA Data Mall API Functionality
v2 introduces a brand new traffic tab. This includes traffic incidents, traffic cameras, and car park availability.
Bonus - Ad Removal
Ads have been removed from SG Transit. Instead, I intend to support development through in-app purchases. The first of these is cosmetic: the Alternative Icon Pack.
The recently released Chrome 69 inexplicably hides “trivial” subdomains, e.g. “www”. It’s such an ill conceived change that it will likely confuse end users. For example, https://citibank.com.sg and https://www.citibank.com.sg are not the same website, though in the address bar they look the same.
The Attorneys General of the Five Eyes1 have a released a statement entitled Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption. The outstanding sentence:
The Governments of the Five Eyes encourage information and communications technology service providers to voluntarily establish lawful access solutions to their products and services that they create or operate in our countries. Governments should not favor a particular technology; instead, providers may create customized solutions, tailored to their individual system architectures that are capable of meeting lawful access requirements.
In other words, the Governments of the Five Eyes are encouraging big technology companies to create backdoors of their choosing to weaken the encryption in their products in order to establish a lawful access solution.
This will not work. Bad actors, which the statement fails to mention, will work overtime to exploit such a solution. That, in turn, will put all sorts of data — from financial to communications — at risk.
Which is beginning to sound more like a magician’s guild. ↩︎
