BusSched for Palm OS/Pocket PC/Windows

BusSched was written by Damien Carbery (daymobrew at users.sourceforge.net). It is an open source application for Palm OS, Pocket PC and Windows. While it was developed to display Dublin Bus timetables on your device/PC, the data format can be used for other transport companies.

Each timetable database contains multiple bus routes. Multiple databases can be stored on your device/PC. To use BusSched you need to download it (Palm OS, Pocket PC, Windows) and a create a timetable.

BusSched was inspired by TrainSched, an open source Palm application for displaying train timetables. The Palm OS version of BusSched contains code from TrainSched. The Pocket PC and Windows versions were written from scratch with MFC.

Screenshots

See a view of BusSched running on a Palm OS device, a Pocket PC device and on Windows.

The Features page contains more screenshots, showing the workings of BusSched.

BusSched database format

The format of text file used to create databases for BusSched is very simple.

The information for each route contains 10 lines. Some of the 'Departures' lines may be empty, when there are no services on that day. The line numbers below are only for clarity, they are not in the text file. Repeat the 10 lines for each route in database.

    1  Route
    2  From
    3  To
    4  Departures Mon-Fri ->
    5  Departures Mon-Fri <-
    6  Departures Sat ->
    7  Departures Sat <-
    8  Departures Sun ->
    9  Departures Sun <-
    10 Remark 1|Remark 2

Departure times are comma separated lists of times, written in 24 hour format, without a colon, and optionally followed by an annotation letter. The times will be displayed in the format appropriate for the country that the user is in.

An example route would be:

    8
    Dalkey (Ulverton Road)
    Parnell Square
    700,800,945,1035,1215,1545,1825b
    815,920,1100,1430,1640,1700,1720
    (empty)
    (empty)
    (empty)
    (empty)
    b: to Ballsbridge.

Note that "(empty)" indicates a blank line as there are no services on this route on Saturday (lines 6 & 7) or Sunday (lines 8 & 9).

The annotation text is shown when the "Info" button is clicked. To break the annotation text into multiple lines, use the pipe character ('|'). These will be converted to line breaks when the text is displayed.

To create a database with multiple routes, simply repeat the 10 line format, without any blank lines between.

After the last route, an optional extra line can be provided, with information about the database contents (click on "Info" in the Select timetable... dialog to display the information).

Site Credits

The site's layout is based on the Translucent Fluidity template by arwen54. The pages are Valid XHTML and Valid CSS. The bus image was provided by IrishBuses.com. All CGI coding was done by Damien Carbery.