Catch SG Buses without breaking into sweat!

SG Buses is a mobile guide for public buses in Singapore. It is developed by Hon Cheng Muh who is a mobile developer at buUuk Pte Ltd. Some of the features that are being listed in the description portion in the marketplace include:

• Bus arrival time for SBS and some SMRT buses
• Browse nearby bus stops in Map
• Click on bus stop in Map to get bus listing and arrival time
• Show nearby bus stops
• Browse/search bus routes by bus number, bus stop number and road names
• Bookmark bus stops and buses

Review

The difference when I have a smartphone- I no longer have to guess how long it takes for the next bus to arrive. Using the Windows Phone, I found that the marketplace does not have “myiris” app! What atrocity, I thought. So I was really glad to find what seems like an alternative app- SG Buses.

I used this app for a period of 3 weeks and so far, I’m not giving up on it. It is not to say that this app is the perfect app. My main problem with the app is how it can be quite unreliable sometimes when loading the arrival times for the buses. I would end up punching the refresh button in vain and be confronted by the error message. It sure gets frustrating. I realise that this problem is most prominent when I’m at the terminal station. 3 refreshes and 3 error message later, I decided to change my bus stop selection to the next stop and voila, the arrival time appeared. Mystified.

There are quite a few features that I particularly liked in this app. I find it great that there are various search options, including a map for easy reference. I appreciate that we are able to load a bus stop’s entire list of buses and their arrival times with just one click with supplementary refresh buttons for each bus service. The arrival times have been rather accurate so far.

Recommendations

• Would be helpful to have start and end times for the bus services
• Fix the bug that affects the loading of the bus times especially at terminal stations
• Allow for more bookmarks and also extending the bookmarks to specific bus services at specific bus stops (could make use of live tiles pining function of Windows Mango to allow greater access too)
• Include feature to automatically detect nearby bus stops and list them for easy selection

Verdict
This is actually a pretty usable app that I would not kill myself over using it. All the deliverables were met! A good to have on your Windows Phone!

Now, if only this app would incorporate the train timings as well… My dream is for there to be an app that would be able to tell me exactly which bus or train I would be catching and calculate the journey time down to the minute. It is not much to ask for, I know for a fact that such services are available in Sweden (for web services but I will be bold in saying that making the web service into a mobile one is definitely possible.) However, unless Singapore develops a clockwork transport system, this dream would remain a dream and our travel apps will only be as accurate as the estimate might be.