SeattleBus 1.1 release – I really haven’t forgotten

I think “I’m ready to go!”, I’ve got it loaded and have been playing with it for the past week or so. Then the other night I happen to look at the application at 11:55pm. Ah yes, that was a mistake.

As it turns out, the date parsing for what I’m trying to do is a tricky little bugger, and looking at the timestamps that resulted at 11:55pm for 3rd & Union downtown showed me a few glaring flaws.

I’ve fixed most of them – the remaining pain point I’m hoping to verify later tonight. It seems that if a bus is scheduled to arrive at 11:55pm, and the current time is 12:01am – the system thinks you’re waiting for the bus that following night at that time, and you get a wait time of something like 1440 minutes.

It also appears that the web system from transit has a slight flaw with their own time display. They display 12 midnight at 12:00pm. I don’t know about you guys, but I always thought that was noon, not midnight. Ah well – another special case in an already messy bit of code, because parsing time from simple strings is frankly just rather fraught with difficult situations.

So with any luck I have this nailed down and ready to go… I’m going to check tonight, and then I’ll be getting it uploaded to the site. Even if I haven’t quite got the bugs all nailed down, I suspect I’ll get it uploaded to the site. I think this bug has been around since day one, so waiting a little more for the fix is better than holding up the other good stuff I want to get into your hands.

Update: As of 7pm PST, September 16th – version 1.1 has been uploaded to Apple and is pending review. There remains a known issue with date parsing and determining “wait times” when you’re looking them up just after midnight. I’m continuing to work on that, and will release an update – but I didn’t want to hold up the other features for that bug.