In Arrivo! HD & Express Blog

The official Blog of the In Arrivo Suite

In Arrivo HD 7.4 submitted

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After a month of work the quite revolutionary new version 7.4 of In Arrivo HD has been completed and submitted to Apple. Here is the quite impressive change-log:

Restyling of the app.
Total revamping of the iPad experience.
Improved localizations for the notifications.
Upon clicking the accessory button of the teleport table is now possible to center the map on the relative location, while touching the cell allows to name and describe it.
The current or teleport location is reported on the screen for ease of reference.
The in app teleport portals may now be shared with other users (iOS7.0+ only).
Even users without the Teleport add-on may see and use portals from other users (iOS7.0+ only).
The taxi annotation reflects again the status of its availability.
Upon sharing a path or completing a taxi ride is possible to share the event on Facebook and Twitter. In the latter case it is also possible to save the taxi among the favorites and/or rate the app.
Faster delivery of directions.
New teasing notifications when reaching or leaving Rome (iOS7.0+ only).
The waiting times table is immediately loaded also upon opening it from the near stops table.
A randomly occurring crash has been fixed.
It is now possible to choose the preferred access of the bus information through the remote common cache instead of directly from the third party back-office in the preferences, so to streamline some desultory information especially in Rome and somewhat accelerate the access (beta).
The settings now also include the possibility of tuning the refresh rate of the stops respect to the fluidity of the app. The lower the value the more responsive the screen but staler the waiting times.
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Updates on the oncoming new release of In Arrivo HD

Some updates on the oncoming release of In Arrivo HD to be possibly submitted during the course of the week.
First of all, the focus of the new release is the improvement of the teleport add-on and of the iPad version.
For the former aspect, the architecture has been totally restructured by moving the storing of the portals from the internal memory to the back office. This allows to handle more data on one side - in fact portals can also have a name and description in addition to the address -, but on the other side it allows to give the feature a social aspect. In fact now portals from other users are also shown, if published, and even users not possessing the teleport add-on my trek through other users’ portals, that, in a way, may turn to way-points.
The iPad exploit is a consequence of a long standing bug on the part of Apple regarding the navigation in the master controller using Auto Layout. Tired of waiting, after a year of receiving no solution from Apple, I decided to get rid of the master controller and present all new views as pop-ups. In a sense that better captures the spirit of the navigation by exploding the annotations being clicked. Perhaps the only disturbing aspect is the tab controller hosting the near stations and the add-ons. I will see in the next version if I may keep at least it in the master controller. For the time being it also appears as a pop-up.
The focus on the add-ons and the iPad does not exclude other important improvements, though. The remote cache is in fact now available as an option in beta to be selected in the settings. That should streamline some funny behaviors of the original waiting times often jumping stops and in general not presenting an integrated experience. The remote cache, by projecting the waiting times forward and backward should at least assure that the next stop has one stop more of waiting and so on. Testing, though, is a nearly impossible endeavor, so use it with caution and possibly report me if you find it working better or worse than the original source.
Moreover directions are now faster in their calculation, thanks to the geo-referencing in advance of the local address, also shown on the bottom. Should a portal be active, the address of the portal is shown underlined. In order to return home it is enough to click it.
Also the new version uses a feature introduced in iOS 7 to handle communication even while in background. This will allow to keep one’s position on the right location even at all times, sort of what happens with the Apple’s “Find my friends” app.
A new feature has also been added to welcome and say farewell to users when they arrive and leave Rome. You will discover it by yourself. Even the other notifications are being improved by means of the silent new features allowing to translate them on the iPhone so allowing to include more characters, even in non-latin alphabets.
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