Train Brain is a iOS application developed between 2009 and 2013 for the Minneapolis/St. Paul (Twin Cities) MN transit market, providing schedule data for the light-rail and commuter rail trains. The application sold in the Apple App Store for $1.99 over a period of several years. The amount of money brought in from sales was not enough to cover ongoing maintenance and further development so development was discontinued and the applications were removed from the App Store.

This codebase is being open sourced as it may contain some useful code and patterns that I can refer to or that others may find useful. The application was used together with a back-end server that provided schedule data formatted as JSON.

History

The application was created by Andy Atkinson while he was a daily commuter using the light rail for work in 2009. Part of the goal was to learn the iOS development kit and release an application. The application icon, visual style, and the application promotional websites were designed by Nate Kadlac. John Doll made contributions to the train brain application code starting in 2012.

Andy attended a Apple developer event in Minneapolis and started looking at the iOS SDK (before it was called "iOS") in version 1, started using it in version 2, and continued into version 6. Lots of upgrades of Xcode and OS X over the years. :)