Software

I’ve made some more changes to iRail;

• small link (top, left corner) to refresh/go to the main page
• fixed an issue where the dropdown menus would display HH:MM when it should be HH+1:MM - e.g. if the time was 17h55, it would display 17h00 instead of 18h00
• added a return/back button to the results page
• changed (shortened) the Dutch text of "noresults/" page, to fit the text on one line (on the iPhone)
• changed the settings icon to something more... "settings" and less "info"
• Removed the link from iRail.be to m.iRail.be. iRail.be will now be the main site
• added "arrival" and "departure" options, to specify whether you want to arrive or depart at that time
• created a bugs and feedback email address - bugs[@]irail[.]be and feedback[@]irail[.]be
• the touch-icon should be here soon

iRail.be will be the new domain for my NMBS/SNCB iPhone Route Planner. 

And expect some more updates by the end of the week. :)

I’ve started translating little bits of the website, into French, Dutch and German (though some of it is still in English). I’ll be translating more the coming days (if it’s needed). Please report all typo’s you should encounter. 

You can change the language options on the settings page.

I’ve built-in a new function; the station name “auto-complete". 

When starting to type in a station name (starting at the 3rd char), it will suggest station names, and you can just tab them to select. 

I made a txt file with all station names I found on the NMBS website. I hope it’s up to date, and if there are any stations missing, please report. :)

The station names depend on their location within Belgium. Flemish stations are Dutch only, Walloon stations French only. Everything inbetween (e.g. Brussels) is in both languages.

I just fixed a bug where he wouldn’t query the NMBS website if you hadn’t picked your language yet. Default language has been set to English.

Thanks to Helene.

These are the things I’ve worked on:

• changed color to dark blue
• added a seperate settings page (you can only change the results page language at the moment (the content downloaded from the NMBS website))
• language settings is saved in a cookie
• station info is saved in a cookie too, instead of a session
• changed date and time to use a dropdown menu and the menu should be updated to "now"
• and many more small changes

Website is accessible through this link: https://yeri.be

As there is no iPhone compatible website or application, I created my own NMBS “route planner” for the iPhone. This is no app though, this is just an iPhone website.

Basicly, this is what you can do:

• fill in departure station
• fill in arrival station
• fill in time and date (of departure)

At this stage of the project, only the basic train details are shown (departure time, arrival time) and up to 3 or 4 different possibilities (depending what the NMBS website replies).

The missing tool in Mac OS X is most likely wget. Here’s a (universal) port.

Read the readme for installation howto. :)

For those using the PDA & iPhone wordpress plugin, which turns your blog into something more readable on a mobile device, don’t forget to add the Google analytics script to your footer.php (in both iphone-theme and pda-theme directory). As other plugins seem to be disabled.

This is actually also meant for me, as a reminder, for when I update the plugin. ;)

I hate having unread mail. I hate having spam. And most of all, I hate spam that asks for attention.

When receiving spam in Gmail, you get the annoying bold Spam (12353434) with ‘12353434’ being the number of unread spam messages.

With the introduction of Gmail Labs I’d hope to see an “automaticly mark spam message as seen” feature, which, well, I haven’t found yet.

Being tired of all these increasing spam numbers, and my daily efforts to “select all unread + mark as read”, I ended up writing a small PHP file which connects to the Gmail (using IMAP, so I asume you’ll need IMAP enabled in your settings..) and marks all spam messages as read. Running this script locally with a curl or cron every X time will solve most of your problems, I hope.