Changes to the Journey Planning in Trains 3.7.x

The behaviour of 3.7.1 depends on how you are searching.

If you are searching between stations, it will offer the arrivals board for the station on pressing the leftmost time. Arrivals and departure boards you can move 24 hours back and forth and they offer better info than the planner. In addition to being able to follow trains on your lock screen, alerts etc….

If you are searching lewisham to a group, for instance “london all stations”, obviously it can’t offer you an arrivals board for “all stations”, so you will get the same behaviour as old versions where it will switch to arrivals.

The app may also suggest a departure board, if it detects you are journey planning for a direct journey.

What to expect for RSSRadio's future

The world of “indie” podcast apps has been one full of inventiveness and variety for a long time.

RSSRadio has been a long running but minor player in this market.

Recently Marco rewrote one of the major players Overcast and the reception has been far from positive. https://marco.org/2024/07/16/overcast-rewrite

I appreciate and can relate to what Marco was trying to do here. RSSRadio a much older codebase than Overcast and podcast apps have so many features it’s a major undertaking. The audience has not been sympathetic to his rewrite and with fierce competition from the big players such as Apple and Spotify the business side of the app must be hard.

This is useful data for me. Having considered Overcast’s experience i think that rewriting RSSRadio would be far too expensive in terms of time to ever pay back.

Does this mean RSSRadio is going away? No, not for as long as i can keep it going which i expect to be many years. I use it myself and don’t want it to go away. However i also don’t plan to add any new features, it will effectively be in maintenance mode.

Recent developments on UK Live Train Times

After a recent business review, it became clear that UK Live Trains has a promising future ahead of it.

Not much as happened with the app for a while as iOS development has moved on and the code had become outdated and difficult to change.

I’ve been spending some time moving the code to the latest Apple technologies, in particular rewriting the widget and adding some more, updating the watch app also adding live activities. In addition the whole app is now in Swift.

For a long time the fee that subscribers pay has helped me build up some quite involved infrastructure which connects to the NRE direct feed and tracks the movement of trains throughout the UK. This previously only powered the push alerts but i’ve now been able to use this in many other aspects of the app. This infrastructure powers many of the new features and means that things like the live activity can update without opening the app.

In addition many of the previous limits have changed. Subscriptions are now a simple monthly or yearly, you can add arrival times for your departure board for free and none of these new features require a subscription.

Looking forward to a bright future for the app.

RSSRadio renewed but still showing ads?

Press here

RSSRadio Premium

Hi everyone,

I'm writing to let you know about some important changes that affect old RSSRadio Premium purchases.

Unfortunately, due to some upcoming API deprecations at Apple, I'm no longer able to validate your previous purchases of RSSRadio Premium. This means that in the latest updates to RSSRadio you will see ads whereas in previous versions you were grandfathered in to no ads without a subscription.

I know it’s never nice to lose something and I apologize for the frustration it may cause. However, I do think it’s important to recognise that RSSRadio Premium was last sold in 2019. I hope you have found value in the many years since your purchase.

I'm asking all previous Premium customers to please subscribe to RSSRadio again.

I appreciate your understanding and thank you for your continued support.

Daniel