Almost two years ago I wrote a little Python script that retrieves availability information for the bicing network in Barcelona. My grand plans to use that script to optimize my morning routine didn’t quite see the light, but the script itself seems to have proved useful to others.
Earlier this year, Eskerda contacted me to let me know that he was interested in writing an application for android to assist bicing users in cycling the city efficiently. As bicing.cat’s servers are dead slow, hitting them directly from each running instance of the application was not an option, so he came up with the idea of a static resource hosted on Google App Engine and updated regularly, using my script.
The result is OpenBicing, a cool application for android. I don’t own an android phone myself, so I couldn’t test it, but it looks really fancy, I particularly like the radius mode. Bonus point, it’s Free Software (Apache license).
And as if it wasn’t good enough, Eskerda set to work to support more bike sharing networks with the same model. OpenSevici and OpenVélib are two standalone applications that respectively cover the networks of Sevilla and Paris.
In an effort to gather them all in a single application in an extensible way, CityBikes was born. Android users and cyclers, go check it out, and don’t forget to send your feedback to the author!
Note to self: consider buying a new phone…