On May 27th, Jason Tremblay and I were interviewed about iSepta by The Digital Lifestyle. Check it out:

Over the past few months, I have really started to admire what I call "Full Stack Web Developers". A full stack web developer is someone that does design, markup, styling, behavior, and programming. Some examples of these types of developers are Jason Tremblay, Geoffrey Grosenbach & Tom Preston-Werner.

Jason Tremblay is a Philadelphia local who I met a little over a year ago. Recently, we started working together on a little project called iSepta where he did all of the user interface design. I was blown away with what he was able to produce as well as the development feedback he gave. I literally could not stop grinning from ear to ear.

Geoffrey Grosenbach is fairly well known in the Ruby on Rails world for the screencast and ebook company he put together called Peepcode. He has done everything for that site from design to development as well as all of the editing and voiceovers. Everything he does looks spectacular but he also has the deep technical knowledge to make most of the screencasts and ebooks.

Tom Preston-Werner has become widely known for such projects as Gravatar where he did all design and development and Github where he did some development but all of the design. He's also known for a project called Fuzed which is a Rails server stack written in Erlang. Yes, Erlang.

About 4-5 years ago, I was in college going for a degree in structural engineering when I decided I had too many ideas not to learn web development. I finished out my structural engineering degree and worked in that field for 2 years before finally going out on my own in July 2007. What that means is while I was learning how to make sure a 60 story condo building was able to withstand an earthquake, I also was trying to learn ruby, rails, html, css, and javascript. That was tough, but I made it through and I think I can finally call myself a developer.

So, where am I going with this? I think I have finally decided that my next professional goal is to learn the last thing to becoming a full stack web developer, design. I am already proficient at everything from the back-end development to javascript, but I have always thrown my hands up in the air when it came to design. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to tackle this like I tackled learning web development over the past few years.

If anybody has any suggestions about how I can go about achieving my new goal, please feel free to speak up! I have a feeling this is going to be quite a bit more difficult than web development since design is so subjective.

Last night we officially launched our latest project, iSepta, "Simple SEPTA Schedules on the Go". Our goal was to make accessing the SEPTA regional rail schedules simple on your cell phone. Although iSepta was initially built for the iPhone, it works just as well on many mobile devices and even your laptop or desktop.

Our number one goal with this application was to make it as simple and intuitive as possible. Although SEPTA's presentation of schedules works great on paper pamphlets, it leaves something to be desired on mobile devices as you can see in the screen shot on the left. We decided to throw away any preconceived notions of how users should interact with train schedules and think we came up with sexy solution that you see on the right.

Features

• Start/Stop: Catching the next train is as easy as choosing your start and stop stations, which will return information for the next 5 trains.
• Recent Trips: Your five most recent trips you have planned will now show up on the home screen along with the next three trains for each trip.
• Route Numbers: The appropriate route number is now displayed with each train

Upcoming

1. Route Names: This will really connect people with what they see at the station. So rather than displaying just "R5" with each train, soon we will display "R5 Thorndale/Paoli."
2. Alert Notifications: SEPTA does provide realtime information on trains that are running late or have been cancelled which we will be integrating shortly into iSepta

One more thing...

Text message support! Simply text "iseptanow start station name to stop station name" to 41411 and receive the next 3 trains. For example, typing "iseptanow market to doylestown" will return the next 3 trains from Market East Station to Doylestown. You only have to type enough of the start and end stations to make it unique, so "iseptanow mark to doy" will also work.

Stay in the Loop

Make sure you keep up to date with what's going on with iSepta by subscribing to our RSS feed or following us on twitter. And as always, let us know what you think! Suggestions? Comments? Anything!

Credits

iSepta developed in partnership with the talented Mr. Tremblay who developed the awesome user interface. This project would not have been possible without Indy Hall where all of us met.

First of hopefully many posts. Yay!