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.

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Not much as happened with the app for a while as iOS development has moved on and the code had become outdated and difficult to change.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

The end of the road for iSitter

iSitter Baby Monitor Discontinued

iSitter, the mobile app that I developed to help parents monitor their babies, will be discontinued on June 15th, 2023.

I started iSitter in June 2011 after checking into a hotel and not getting an adjoining room for my kids, with the goal of making it easier for parents to keep an eye on their babies, even when they're not home. The app was a success, and I was able to help thousands of parents monitor their babies.

However, in recent years, the cost of running iSitter has increased significantly. The cost of hosting the app, supporting it, and marketing has become too high. As a result, iSitter is no longer profitable.

I'm disappointed to have to discontinue iSitter, but I believe it is the best decision for my business. I want to focus my time and energy on developing my existing successful products.

I want to thank all of you who have used iSitter. I appreciate your support and feedback. I hope that you will continue to use my other products, including RSSRadio and UK Train Times.

iSitter 5.0

iSitter now supports proper streaming video and audio!

This is a change i’m delighted to be able to make and its been my ambition for a long time to move away from the default “slideshow” mode.

(GIF - app quality is better)

Sending a crash report

Crash reports from my apps are normally automatically sent (with your consent). Sometimes I may ask you to send a crash report manually, here is how to do it.

Open the Settings app

iOS12 & 13: Go to Privacy, Analytics, Analytics Data

Use the share button to send it to me.