Bus Panda

What?

Do you live in Wellington, New Zealand and use the bus often? If so, you need Bus Panda!

The information you want, when you want it, with minimum fuss and distraction. Store as many favourite bus stops as you want by adding them from a map or by stop ID. Very quickly access realtime departure information along with timetables and see local Wellington weather from a variety of weather providers.

No clumsy interfaces, heavy graphics taking up space on your device or restrictions on the number of favourite stops. Bus Panda doesn’t even waste precious space on a journey planner; several other apps do that already! It's just about the stops you already know and use.

Bus Panda uses iCloud to sync stop information between your iOS devices, should you choose to install it on more than one under the same iTunes account.

Why?

MetLink didn't have an app when I started this – at least not one I could find – but Bus Panda was a background project and took forever to finish. MetLink do have an app now, but it's a little slow and restrictive for my liking and doesn't provide access to the weather. I pretty much always check that in the morning at the same time as looking at the upcoming bus departure times. It does have a prettier UI and things like a route planner, so you should check out the competition as maybe you'll prefer it.

The MetLink web site has no service API for Bus Panda to use. Instead Bus Panda must screen scrape data from mobile web site fetches. A recent everything-went-grey site redesign caused a lot of headaches as a result, with sections of Bus Panda needing updates for anything to work including an internal table of route colours given the MetLink all-grey redesign. If MetLink rebuild or change their site structure again, I will have to adapt Bus Panda once more - a new release should appear on the App Store within a few days.

Privacy Policy

I have no interest in anyone's personal data! Bus Panda stores your favourite stop choices locally on your iOS device(s) and, if you're connected up to iCloud, it will sync your settings with the Apple-run iCloud servers and only the iCloud servers. The information is not sent anywhere else. Bus Panda doesn't gather or transmit any usage statistics, demographics or other personal data when setting favourites, using the map view or when looking at the realtime bus information for a given stop..

Note that the MetLink timetable view and the weather tab fetches the web site of the chosen service provider. These web sites may include some kind of tracking, but Bus Panda does not store e.g. cookies or other data from visit to visit - it's not a web browser, it's just providing a quick way to access timetable and weather information. If worried, though, please check the privacy policy of the chosen service on their web site.

Screenshots