Buster App Review

App Store - $1.99

As of 02.20.2012

Buster App in Action

Underrated, Overused

One of the most outstanding achievements in technology has been the implementation of public transportation tracking, and its availability to the public via the Internet. Apparently vehicle tracking systems these days typically use GPS or GLONASS technology for locating the vehicle as it traverses terrain. I have no idea what Chicago’s CTA buses and trains use, but I sure appreciate that they’ve implemented it over the past several years. Even though they don’t have displays at all of their bus/train stops, the CTA website performs fantastically well (and accurately) as an estimation tool for when to expect arrivals and transfers.

While the site works on mobile browsers, it isn’t design as elegantly as it ought to be. Touch targets are designed for some backasswards pre-2007 mobile phone browser, and there is no way to quickly access commonly frequented routes (unless you were to bookmark the starting point of each one). We must then let expect the digital marketplace to provide a better solution.

Enter Buster App

And the marketplace did answer.

While Buster app isn’t the only CTA app available on the App Store, it’s by far the best. You could argue it’s merely a glorified skin for the CTA mobile websites for tracking buses and trains, but you’d be wrong. It’s a clever integration of the data available through CTA’s bus/train tracking systems and the conveniences therein of an app that allows for the following perks:

• Saving favorites
• Identifying nearby stops for quick access
• Easy switching between cardinal directions at a selected stop
• Checking time estimates between transfers (i.e., you’re tracking one bus and checking when that bus will arrive at another stop to transfer buses)
• Sort by route or name
• Notifications for next bus arrivals

These are useful, convenient features that accelerate your accessibility of CTA times and ensures your trips along the oftentimes unreliable CTA are maximized.

Well Designed

The design considerations for Buster follow Apple’s Human User Guidelines to a T. Tabular navigation at the bottom of the screen, status bar visible at the top (useful for keeping an eye on the time as you browse), correctly sized tap targets, considerations for the high resolution displays, and neat use of location services for finding nearby bus stops. The contextual tabs at the top (switching between Sort by Bus/Sort by Name, for instance) and contextual back buttons (for instance:

And as a utility app, Buster deserves homepage placement. If I’m going anywhere other than downtown Chicago for work, this thing is tapped constantly. I’ll easily plot a route and maintain my expectations with exacting precision. If we weren’t so desensitized with the incredible feats of technology, the experience of using Buster would feel very much like precognition.

…the web is now largely filters on top of filters on top of filters

— 5 Minutes with Kottke

Saddleback Leather

A recent discovery, Saddleback Leather is a serious online retailer specializing in leather goods. They sell geniune, 100% leather goods across several accessory lines, including wallets, business bags, luggage, and belts. The warranty for their products also happens to be 100 years. Yeah, no shit. Fortunately, the seriousness ends with their products, and everything else is military-grade wit. Nothing beats a good copywriter.

So I recently placed an order for a fairly inexpensive wallet — an extremely simple thing, featuring one slot that holds around 8 cards (when jammed tightly in), and provides a finger hole at the bottom for popping up and extracting. As any good retailer, these fellows have a friendly Common Questions tab for each of their products. An important question of moral integrity regarding the leather’s origin receives an excellent response:

Are the animals tortured before they are slaughtered?

Absolutely not! With some pigs we do use waterboarding and sensory deprivation techniques previous to slaughtering them, but the cows do not require any special handling.

How you can not support a place like this? The whole site is a delight to read. When I actually received my wallet, tucked between the leather was a small business card of the company CEO with the tagline of “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.” More, please.

The Classics Unearthed (Taken with instagram)

iPod Touch & the Mobile Market

For all of those seemingly astonished analysts (via 512 Pixels) mulling over the fact that Apple owns the mobile marketplace (even after the rise of Android OS’s footprint): how did you not see this coming? Not only does iOS still rake in the largest share of all mobile app purchases, but let’s not forget they also sell and rent movies and TV shows, and are still the number one retailer for music.

But while everyone talks iPhones and iPads, there’s a sneaky product that’s probably contributing to these numbers a hell of a lot more than most people would guess. One look around the families gathered at our Christmas tree this year and it’s evident that iPod touches are selling very well to the younger (and teenage) crowd. Almost all of my cousins currently owned one or received one for Christmas — and every single one of them received iTunes gift cards to spend on Apple’s digital stores. While setting these things up is a bit tedious (I helped two younger cousins get through the process of creating email accounts and Apple IDs), once everything is operational, it’s clear that kids grasp digital frameworks quickly — just hearing them discuss games and apps, how important reviews are, and maximizing the credit attributed to their accounts is explanatory enough to reinforce this. It’s also obvious, as a result, that Apple and its developers are making a significant amount of revenue from customers without credit cards tied to Apple IDs and gift cards. It’s a fantastic method for permitting young customers to access and purchase on a mobile marketplace without the need of a credit card.

The bigger problem for the marketplace is that, after five years, there is hardly any competitor to the iPod touch (or phone-less smartphone). And just like Apple dominates the so-called “tablet” market, they too dominate a market without valid competition: the phone-less smartphone market (which isn’t really a phone-less market when you factor in phone-enabling apps over wifi like Skype and Google Voice). If no one can manufacture a version of a smartphone without subsidies, then the marketplace really does belong to Apple. Apparently some have tried, but none have succeeded in denting marketshare. It’s certainly worse than the digital music player market that Apple nearly owned entirely with its iPods during the 2000s. And just like that market, they’re doing the same to the tablet and smartphone-less ones. Good luck to anyone who can marshall the financing and resources to take on these markets. At this point, though, it’d be wiser to carve a niche into somethign new.

Apple Store App: In-Store Pickup

A few months ago, Apple updated their Apple Store app (the app tied to its physical retail stores, not the digital ones) to version 2.0. The added features circulated the tech blog rounds with applause, but they never caught on with mainstream media. Granted, the new features would be alien to a normal in-store shopper. And after having used them, it would take me quite a few times to ease habitually into them. But if more stores employed the features, shopping would certainly be more enjoyable.

So what exactly did Apple update? The big features released in Version 2.0 include the following:

• Browse and purchase products in-app, then pick up at store
• Easily purchase accessories on your own in-store with EasyPay

I did the former the other evening; the latter still seems too strange to me. Apple is granting enormous trust on its customers with the latter. And that’s actually something I did learn when speaking to the employee about the pick-up service — he reassured me that I should really try it and that they trust us — that they’re really trying to educate their customers on trusting them in their stores (which is fascinating considering the foot traffic they receive on an hourly basis).

So: while at work, I bought an accessory in-app (even picked out a specific color from a customize drop-down) and selected in-store pick up. It detected the nearby Apple Stores, and I merely tapped one and it automatically checked store inventory. Purchased it. Done.

About five minutes after receiving purchase confirmation emails, I was sent another email informing me that the product was ready for pick-up. Alas, I had to wait another five hours for work to elapse.

Propmtly after work, I jaunted over to the Michigan Ave store and checked my iPhone. This is what you see after tapping open the Apple Store app and initiating the pick-up screen:

Works Like It Should

The whole thing is magically slick. Stand anywhere you want in the store, tap Pick Up Now, and the app will initiate a process on the back-end that informs available Apple employees to the presence of a pick-up customer (I asked later about this, and was told that they have select individuals “on-duty” for these kinds of things).

I did, however, feel strange that somehow this wouldn’t exactly work, so I just went up to an Apple employee (a friendly guy named Pat) and told him what I was doing. He was rather surprised and genuinely excited about trying this out (apparently he hadn’t done it yet), so I re-did the Pick Up Now tap and we watched on his iPhone screen as an alert popped up. And just like that, my order information was provided so Pat could easily grab it from the back. (He had the option of returning me an alert that someone was on their way to me, but we skipped it.)

Within half a minute I had my product in-hand and a confirmation email sent to my phone. I know Apple retail stores aren’t the first to have a system in place for purchasing online and then picking up at store, but it’s by far the smoothest. I’ve tried Best Buy’s before and while it works, you have to stand in line and wait at Customer Service (which is the most awful part of their stores), as well as hope they’ve actually received the request for pick-up by the time you get to the clerk. For last-minute shopping, Apple’s process takes the cake.

The Bane of Share Buttons

If you have this on your site, please remove it. Just delete the code. Please.

Why would this look good — anywhere? Seeing a variation of this row of share buttons is just as vexing as seeing Flash ads initiate without your consent. Services like ShareThis are the bane of the Internet. If someone is going to share or link to an article (or product or service), they’ll likely do it by either:

1. Copying the URL and pasting (because haven’t we habitually been doing this for decades?)
2. Using their mobile OS’s built-in share service (which often includes the most important methods)

And for the sake of sensibility, if you’re going to do this, at least place them at the bottom of the article. Why the fuck would you put them at the top, near the title? By doing this, you assume your reader has read the content already — just as they land at the top of the page. This is impossible. And publications that send out newsletters with the share buttons affixed to the titles of featured articles (ahem, Atlantic) demonstrate even more incompetence.

You should loathe seeing share buttons on pages because of the following:

• Off-color, different-sized buttons clash with the aesthetic of your website
• Share options typically load pre-written text surrounding a link that doesn’t reflect your sentiments or your readers’
• Low share numbers recorded on some of the buttons can depress readers’ trust in your content
• More numbers to keep track of by way of more analytics on shared links — which, by the way, may even conflict with readers’ own methods for shortening URLs or doing other things to your URL that you can’t even track with a service like ShareThis

This isn’t a rant. It’s good advice. Take it and make the Internet a better place.

“Modern” social media is shit.

Pinboard’s maestro says it best:

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.

Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.