Ottawa Transit Commission say No to OC Transpo BlackBerry app
Last winter, the transit commission in Ottawa Canada asked their staff to see about working with the federal government to get a BlackBerry version of an OC Transpo next-bus app onto federal BlackBerry’s.
Public servants are big transit users and many of them have government-supplied BlackBerry’s that are pretty tightly controlled, the thinking went, so the city should work with the federal government to get a useful app onto them. This turned out to be somewhat tricky, in that federal BlackBerry’s don’t come from one central supply shop, so the city would have to deal with a bunch of different departments and so on, but OC Transpo’s people said they’d see what they could do.
At Monday’s transit commission meeting, general manager John Manconi said they’ve concluded it’s not a cause worth pursuing any further. OC Transpo worked with the bureaucracy and even with RIM, and together they concluded that since there are so many web-based interfaces for OC Transpo’s open data on exact bus locations and when they’ll get to particular stops, that’s good enough.
So there won’t be a dedicated BlackBerry 10 app? Coun. Stephen Blais, who was keen on the idea early this year, clarified? Right, said Manconi. As far as official OC Transpo apps go, Apple’s iOS is it. For everyone else, the data is available freely but they’ll need someone to write an app if that’s the experience they want, because OC Transpo won’t be doing it. The web is the way to go.
