Info
NextFerry mobile app tells you when the next ferry is leaving, for the Washington State Ferries in Puget Sound. It has no advertising or other "monetization"; it only does what it looks like it does. It is available on IOS, Android and Windows Phone.
Features:
- Choose which ferry routes you want to see.
- Show upcoming departures for each route.
- Show complete weekday/weekend schedule for each route.
- If "use location" is turned on, calculate travel times to ferry departure and color code the departures as "can't make it"(red), "maybe if you hurry"(yellow) and "easy"(green).
- Show today's alerts from WSDOT for each route.
Privacy statement: the NextFerry app communicates with a server. The server receives an IP address (necessary for any communication) and (if you allow the app to do so) your location. That information possibly could be used to track someone if it were obtained by someone who wanted to do so. The NextFerry service does not use this information for any purpose other than providing information back to the app, and good security practices are used to prevent any unintended use of the information by any party.
The NextFerry app is not affiliated with WSDOT. The schedule shown is based on the officially published schedule, which does not account for changes that WSDOT may make on a day-to-day basis. Please consult the WSDOT website for definitive information.
Limitations:
- The per-route weekday/weekend schedule is a simplification of the real schedule. Some ferry routes have Friday-only or Saturday-only departures that will not show up in this schedule. However, the schedule on the main page is now (as of Sept 2015) correct for every day of the week.
- Currently only shows simplified routes for the San Juan Islands (Anacortes to/from Orcas and Friday Harbor). If there is enough demand, I can extend it to include the other islands.
- The touch response is poor on some Android phones. I'm trying to find a fix.
App Pages
- NextFerry in the Windows Phone Store
- NextFerry in the Google Play (Android) Store
- NextFerry in the IOS store
Under the Hood
NextFerry is a side project of mine. Like most of my projects, I wrote NextFerry because I needed it myself. There weren't (at that time) any schedule apps for the Washington State Ferries, and I wanted an app that made it easy to figure out if I could make the next ferry, or to choose between the Bainbridge and Edmonds ferries. The NextFerry app is designed to do exactly that with absolutely minimal interaction or cognitive load (yes, I sometimes use it while driving the car).
The client (this project) is HTML5/JQuery and uses
iScroll,
hammer.js,
the Dosis font,
and icons by
Freepik.
The back end is a python server hosted by
Google App Engine.
Travel times are provided by
MapQuest
.