Sorry to hear that. As a developer of an existing tool, not many people leave constructive feedback - in my experience it's either overwhelmingly positive or uninstall with no explanation, so it's difficult to gauge what people want (except less adverts/make everything free - but servers aren't free).
RailChecker is one of the better ones! But on iOS, I don't find it quite as polished as Railboard, and - although I'm aware this is rather irrational - I was more prepared to throw together a website than pony up the £2/month for the desktop version!
And thanks for the detailed bug reports!
A few (minor) observations:
- Where a train is indefinitely delayed, it should also apply to the last location for that train - e.g. 2C34 13:57 London Kings Cross to Cambridge was delayed indefinitely for all stops from Alexandria Palace onwards, but your website was showing an on time arrival at Cambridge (see attached image #1).
Good catch, thanks!
- Services with additional stops added in don't have estimated/actual times shown at certain locations (see attached image #2 for Balcombe).
Huh, strange - I'll have to investigate that a little.
- Maybe not a concern for now, but consider implementing a mechanism to avoid hitting the rate limit for LDB - 5,000 requests per hour - especially given that your website essentially polls the API every minute.
This is a good point, especially as I'm currently borrowing someone else's API key (via Huxley) due to the LDB sign-up issues! I have, for what it's worth, sent in a request for my own, which I'll start using as soon as I get it. My longer term plan is to switch to push port.
(Incidentally, out of curiosity: does RailChecker use LDB? RailChecker seems to be willing to show future departures past 4 hours, which Huxley can't; but I can't tell if this limitation is imposed by Huxley or LDB itself.)
And to return the favor: RailChecker doesn't currently seem to handle 3-way joins, as done by the highland Caledonian Sleeper; for example, tonight's departure doesn't show the Fort William portion at all. (Although I'm pretty sure my handling of this case is somewhat broken as well…)
Edit: also, when detailed mode is off, only the Inverness portion is shown (even when viewed from a non-Inverness-portion departure board); presumably this relates to the join happening at a non-passenger stop.
(except less adverts/make everything free - but servers aren't free)
For what it's worth, this is currently running just fine on a hosting provider's free plan. If this gains sufficient popularity that that becomes untenable, things would get interesting, but I'll cross that bridge as and when it starts to become an issue. Presumably that's not possible for RailChecker, which is fair enough.