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My live departure boards site

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dbrb2

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Hello,

I put together a noncomercial site a while back to display departure boards at

http://livetrains.co.uk

It was starting to look rather dated, so I have just finished updating it - functionality is still largely the same, but it should be easier to use and work better on mobile phones.

If anyone has any usability orother suggestions I'd be happy to try to take them on board :)

Cheers,

Ben
 
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dbrb2

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Is that in board view or individual service view?

Does the table simply get cut off before the final column?
 
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dbrb2

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Hmm...table formating on multiple devices does my head in. I'll have a fiddle around
There should be 4 collumns, (Plat, From, To, Due, black arrow)

Not being an apple man having trouble replicating, but I'll see what I can do :)
 
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dvboy

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Do away with some of the pointless abbreviations when the full station name can clearly fit in the space (if you can spell out Birmingham International in full):

Watford J'ction
Milton Keynes C'tral
Manchester Pic'lly
Wolverh'pton
 
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dbrb2

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The abbreviations were put in to help fit the data onto small mobile screens, but since there are inevitably more station names than I have abbreviations for, there are many stations where the full name is used. I can be slightly more generic - replacing "street" with "st" and "road" with "rd" etc, but some will always drop through the net...
 
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william

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greatkingrat said:
What are you expecting to see? The next TP at Durham is the 2207 to Newcastle which is still off the bottom of the departure board at the moment.
Click to expand...

IIRC there was a scheduled departure a few minutes after I checked, sometime just before 2000hrs. However, it was a very quick check so I may have made a mistake, hence the question mark at the end of my post. I've checked this morning and it is indeed showing TPE services.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
I've just checked the Sunderland board and both Metro and Grand Central services are shown. It is also showing delays clearly in red.

My only criticism is the fact that it only shows services an hour ahead for a busy station like Sunderland.
 
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dbrb2

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I have increased the board window to show up to 2 hours ahead - the maximum the data feed allows
 
bb21

bb21

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I think as a basic departure board this is absolutely fine. Some websites are a little cluttered imo when all the user wants to know is the departure information.

It might be better that when the auto-fill list appears the rest of the screen is not shifted down though. When a station is being selected there is not really any need for previous searches to be viewable in full, although that is just my personal preference.

It is a very useful feature to have stations in recent searches easily selectable. What I think would be even more useful is for the list of recent searches to be pooled together and available for either of the boxes, so that a return/reverse journey can be checked with minimum effort. This is one of the more often performed requests.
 
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W230

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Like it. :)

I think I might end up using this instead of the mobile version of the live NRE site as the NRE page never seems to work on my mobile anymore.
 
cjp

cjp

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I found, on my Nokia, the plain site without Java looked better and it worked well. For day to day use it seemed simpler than Open Train Times - although of course it gives less.
 
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Lrd

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Where is 'Sampton Central'? or 'Sampton Airpt Parkway'?

I know it's meant to be Southampton but it looks nothing like it! Shorthand for Southampton is Soton if you really need to shorten it.
 
wintonian

wintonian

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bb21 said:
Or Scumpton. :lol:

(Sorry, couldn't resist the temptation.)
Click to expand...

Oi, just because you got promoted, and in any case your still a league bellow us unlike that awful blue lot down the road who will be closer to Eastleigh/ Havant next season than us.... :lol:

Anyway the LDB site, although I haven't actually tried it on a mobile device it looks Ike it would be very good on one - always a good thing these days. However in FF 20 on Fedora 18 it's not so pretty being stuck in mobile view, could it be made to be more versatile in this regard or use device detection and ave 2 versions?
 
bb21

bb21

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wintonian said:
Oi, just because you got promoted, and in any case your still a league bellow us unlike that awful blue lot down the road who will be closer to Eastleigh/ Havant next season than us.... :lol:
Click to expand...

I didn't think you would take the bait. I'm sorry.
hihi.gif


(Now I am genuinely sorry for dragging this thread off-topic. I am not quite my normal self today.
4.gif
)
 
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dvboy

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If your replacement were case specific, ie replace South with S but not south, that would work.

Have a look at the twitter feeds in my signature, I had to do a lot of search/replace abbreviations for those, in most cases it involved a rule for each individual station, there weren't any that covered all (aside from Intl, Apt, Pwy, Jn, Br, St, Rd, Hl, Pk etc and compass points).
 
Eagle

Eagle

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dvboy said:
If your replacement were case specific, ie replace South with S but not south, that would work.
Click to expand...

No it wouldn't, as Southampton still has a capital S.

How to do it would be to get it to replace "South " and " South" with "S " and " S" (i.e. when next to a space, meaning only the whole word got replaced).
 
bb21

bb21

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Eagle said:
No it wouldn't, as Southampton still has a capital S.

How to do it would be to get it to replace "South " and " South" with "S " and " S" (i.e. when next to a space, meaning only the whole word got replaced).
Click to expand...

Wouldn't that depend on the format the data is in? (I have no idea what format it is in btw.)

If it is parsed as a string, eg. "Reading 1254 Winchester 1259 Southampton Apt Pkwy 1312 ...", then that method wouldn't work either.
 
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dbrb2

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"Bridge" is half right. Surely you don't want to know the city as well :)

I'll fix that now!
 
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dvboy

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Eagle said:
No it wouldn't, as Southampton still has a capital S.

How to do it would be to get it to replace "South " and " South" with "S " and " S" (i.e. when next to a space, meaning only the whole word got replaced).
Click to expand...

Yes I was talking complete rubbish.

I think how the system I use for my journeycheck feeds does it is it looks for South as a whole word, and ignores it if it isn't.
 
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