Blue bike mobile app
creative
technology
One day while loitering in the Cambridge library I noticed a monitor listing MBTA bus and train arrival times. I already knew how to build that.
To my surprise there was also a list of bikes available at nearby stations of the Boston area bike sharing system Blue Bikes. I made a note to lookup whether they have a public API and it turns out they do. Not only that, but there is a data definition called the General Bikeshare Feed Specification that is followed by bike sharing systems around the world.
As could be imagined, Blue Bikes has its own app, I’m not looking to replace it, just wanted to take their API out for a spin. My app shows how many bikes are available at each station and how many docks are accepting bikes. Filters can be set to show only stations in certain cities and stations may be sorted based on distance from the device.
It sure is fun standing near a bike station and watching the count of available bikes change as people return and rent bikes.
Along with wanting to explore the Blue Bike API I used the development of this app as an opportunity to learn Flutter and Dart, mobile development tools created by Google.
The web page for Flutter breathlessly urges the developer to “Paint your app to life in milliseconds”. I’m not sure I wholeheartedly agree that’s possible, but it does let one build a UI pretty quickly. Then there’s the question of making the UI do something, which is where Dart comes in. I wonder if Google really needed to create a new language when there are so many serviceable languages already, but who am I to second-guess Google?
The code is available on GitHub.