samvermette

Only reason we were able to deploy this quickly is because of the 2 pilots we've been successfully running for the past 3 weeks.

Calendar to show a "Show Upcoming Events" option in the search. If you don't tap it we don't access it. Photos to allow installing the app on an SD card (popular request). Identity to use your name in the Send Feedback option. Here again if you don't tap it we don't access it.

You're only going to get accurate departure times if someone else is using GO on that bus/train you're waiting for!

Those 2 cities is where we've been piloting crowdsourcing. The app itself works in 125 metro areas.

That's good to know for when we launch Tokyo, thank you.

Definitely not in the top 5, not sure why he said that...

Nice typo right?

Flash website; must be a scam.

All excellent points. You're right we should have put more thoughts into our city roadmap. We basically looked up US city metro populations and went with that (how terrible, I know). With all the traffic and feedback we get now, it has become clearer which cities should have been prioritized (Miami and San Diego for instance were an absurd waste of time and resources). DC is definitely coming this week, followed shortly by Seattle and LA.

It only uses foursquare for suggestions. Read up my comment above that explains how it works.

Not sure what's you're referring to here. Maybe it's your local rendering engine... Screenshot please?

Haha, yeah probably canadian myopia. I think it's because we had a couple requests for Austin a while ago so we decided to do it. But with all the requests we're getting now, it's much more clear which cities need to be added next (Seattle, Washington DC, L.A., Portland).

Thanks for the technical precisions re: address geocoding in NYC.

Right now, tapping the return key will try finding an exact match of what you entered on Foursquare. If it fails, it will fall back to the geocoder and then proceed immediately with the routing request. This will be improved in 1.2.1 as the return key will now be labeled "Search" instead of "Route" and will no longer trigger the direction request.

Indeed the foursquare suggestions make address lookup confusing, as the Foursquare suggestions sometimes make no sense with what the user entered. I thought of maybe leaving them out when the search text starts with a number, but then that would leave out venues that start with numbers as well.

Someday... but first we want to cover solid grounds in US and Canada.

I agree. It's also a problem for Victoria and Kelowna in BC, which are both listed under Vancouver. We need to find a way to better communicate this information in the near future. Maybe something like a search or use the browser's geolocating services to tell you whether your area is supported or not.

You'd be surprised at how ugly the data we get provided is. The "curating" is actually much of the work we do. We probably spent as much time developing internal tools that clean and improve that data that on the app itself.

Server costs and continued development also are recurring expenses. Like I said, we might have gone down a different path if Apple allowed paid upgrades, but they don't.

Yeah, like Jarek said. A bunch of very small agencies in cities close to Montreal, but not far/big enough to give them a "dedicated" city page/bundle...

As a workaround, you can drop a pin anywhere on the map with a long tap.

We haven't. You're right that some help on the business side of things wouldn't hurt. With the iOS 6 launch though, Apple is pretty much taking care of the marketing end. Not sure what else could VCs bring us... (maybe that's just me being naive here)

We do, at least for the cities we plan on supporting very soon: http://thetransitapp.com/support

Servers and app maintenance has recurring fees. Taking public transportation itself is based on a pay-per-use model. Why assume that paying 2.99$ for an app entitles you to free lifetime updates and support? A lot of apps do it, but more and more we hear that it is not a sustainable revenue model. It would be a whole lot different if Apple allowed paid upgrades, but they don't.

I agree this needs to be improved. The problem is with Apple's geocoder, which seems to be really dumb at finding addresses. We would like to use Google Geocoding Service instead, but they don't allow it if we don't display the results on a Google Map (and starting with iOS 6, the map tiles are now provided by Apple).

Indeed, we're getting ridiculous amounts of bad reviews re: our pricing model. People were used to getting transit direction for free in iOS 5, so there's a lot of angry people out there. Some people suggest we should get VC money and make the app free, but what we (@gcamp and I) really want is to make the best transit app out there and not have to care about an exit strategy or pleasing greedy angels.