idlemind

I've always felt like I was slightly fighting against the Pen tool in most vector drawing apps, especially when drawing Bezier splines. The direct manipulation looks like a massive improvement, and would also be more intuitive with a touch or stylus interface.

Secondly, this is one of the best examples I've seen of genuine UX and HCI research put into a tool that everyone else thought was "good enough".

This is part two of the series. Covered this week:

Searching for stops, Retrieving stops and stations with facilities, Finding stops near a co-ordinate or in a bounding box, Finding StopPoint information for all stops on a line or bus route, Finding the locations of other things, Santander Cycle docking stations

Transport for London have officially launched their Unified API:

"The API supports all the data requirements of the tfl.gov.uk website. Every data driven aspect (including maps) of the tfl.gov.uk website is powered by the Unified API. If you can see it on our website it should be in the API."

My favourites are more about the general craft of software development than specifics e.g.

The Pragmatic Programmer: Hunt and Thomas

The Mythical Man Month: Frederick Brooks

I can't tell whether this is hubris, technical naïveté or just an attempt to garner votes. Possibly all three. But let's assume they are proposing a ban on communications methods that cannot be lawfully intercepted (that's certainly how Cameron words it).

Firstly, we know it's technically infeasible, secondly it would have a serious chilling effect on UK Internet companies and the digital economy, and thirdly it would actually take very popular apps and tools from young voters hands. So does he really think people will be panicked enough by the threat of terrorism to vote for it?

I think they are, foolishly, staying quiet on some recent victories. They've said as much. It could actually be to their benefit to release more about some of the cases where they don't reveal more about "methods" than the public already knows. But they probably won't, because it goes against their culture of secrecy, they'd rather pretend Snowden never happened.

Very nice, I've always been dissatisfied with most visualisations of real git repos using git flow. It's really hard to explain to non-devs the state of the branches, ideally the roadmap to the next release would be glanceable.

We're looking to build an AtlasBoard for our project and the ideas here are very useful. We use bitbucket, so I'm not sure how similar the APIs there are to Stash, but one would hope they are similar enough that your code points us in the right direction.

It's a great tool, we use it all the time on our team. It's the easiest way I've found to share a full demonstration of the API all in one go, with documentation. Couldn't live without it now!

Most of us wouldn't know the back end of a plane from the front end of a tube train :)

Yep, freshness or TTL in our cache layer.

Surprised more people haven't noticed there's an SVG tube map right there! Bonus: it's tagged with the station Naptan codes and TransXChange route ids that are the API's currency.

More information about 3rd party Oyster apps and TfL's upcoming mobile-friendly Oyster website here: http://blog.tfl.gov.uk/2014/03/12/why-a-new-website-but-no-a...

Edit: ha, beat me to it alex :)

The link is fixed in the next release. I will ask about the password rules - that does sound annoying.

Forgot to namecheck the TfL team though, oops! Fixed now. (Sorry guys!)

Can you send me a link to the journey planner results? There is no specific way to contribute improvements to the results, best way for now would be to leave feedback through the form in the title bar of the new website.

Edit: You also might get some mileage out of setting your walking speed to "Fast" and selecting "Routes with fewest changes"

Looks fantastic! There is also an API and documentation available at http://api.tfl.gov.uk.

Disclaimer: I'm part of the combined TfL and BAE Systems Applied Intelligence team (née Detica) that did the build and architecture, along with the great folks at We Are Experience and Attenda.