Your place to share stories on and off the bus.
Our brethren across the Bay, AC Transit, alerted us to this amazing video demonstrating something most of us need help with — getting your bike into one of those dadgum contraptions on the front of the bus. Why, just this morning, we ran a diary-ette about “mounting” stuff to the bike rack. How timely.
Say it with me now one time: “Bring it down, pull the bar, put it on, put it on, take it off, put it up when you’re done, when you’re done…”
Now that it’s come out of forced hibernation and I have a chance to pick this review up where I left off, I have to say — Routesy sure is one slick iPhone app.
I barely had a chance to tinker with it before it was taken off iTunes, following the much-covered flap between the app’s developer, Steven Peterson, and NBIS, a shady couple of dudes claiming ownership over the prediction data that helps power Routesy.
Well, that was all fine and dandy, but now Routesy is back, and perhaps owing to my sense of anticipation, it’s on top of its game.
Photo by Flickr user colin_brumelle
SF Appeal has the goods. Injuries reported by SFFD as “serious.” We’ll update when we learn more.
Update (Aug. 19, 3:15 p.m.): SF Appeal has more or less wrapped this story of lameness up. MTA and Apple have both told NBIS to take a hike, and don’t let the door hit ya … Oh, and now that Routesy is live once again, we’ll be finishing up our review and posting it soon. It was cut short as this whole brouhaha went down.
Original post (July 10): Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, Ken Schmier and Alex Orloff at NextBus Information Systems (NBIS) got in a fight with Steven Peterson of Routesy. Who are these people? What’s NBIS? Where’s my bus? Good questions.
So, here it goes. We’ve all seen the bus-arrival data flashing at us from bus shelters across town; many of you have probably gotten it on your cellphone. But the matter of who owns this data and who can use it recently became a hot debate when Peterson, the developer of the iPhone app Routesy, got into a disagreement with NBIS, the company that claims to have rights to that sometimes-accurate information flashing at you from the bus stop and on the interwebs.
Oh, and when we say “NBIS,” that is not the same thing as NextBus, Inc.
I know.
Photo by Flickr user thebrandbuilder
You thought you wouldn’t be able to take BART today, but woke up to find some good news — the threatened BART strike was called off. Well, we’ve got even better BART news for you today.
After two years in the womb, the Muni Diaries crew is welcoming our proud little spawn, BART Diaries! Many of you have shared BART tales here, and we figured our speedy little subway deserves its own storytelling space. After all, where else (okay, besides Muni) can you see grown men fight like school girls, erotic magazine on full display, and hear a hot operator’s voice for free?
So if you’re a BART rider, stop by BART Diaries and start sharing your strange and wonderful BART tales. Send us your stories, pictures, videos, and anything else BART-related to bartdiaries@gmail.com. You can also follow BART happenings on Twitter @bartdiaries.
Photo by Flickr user David July
Update (6:43 p.m.): Now SFGate concurs — the strike has been called off.
Original post: It was the Muni Diaries Twitter feed that first predicted it: It appears, though no formal announcement has been made yet, that the two sides have avoided a strike that was set to begin tonight at midnight. The Examiner has more. We’re waiting for further details, sources before we remove that question from the post title.