Austin Traffic updated

My Austin Traffic iPhone web app just received its first major update. There were really just two changes:

• Traffic incident types are now shown at the beginning of the table items and drawn in red.


• Now uses proper capitalization instead of everything being lowercase. This was change was pretty easy to add thanks to John Gruber sharing his title-casing script and Adam Nolley porting it to PHP.

I know there are bugs with some street names (e.g. McNeil) but those can easily be fixed once I know about them. Don't be afraid to send in bug reports to support@kerlmax.com.

Next up on my plate for Austin Traffic is to show the incident times and optimize it more for even faster loading over EDGE while you're sitting in traffic on Mopac or I-35. I still need to investigate the optimizations but already have several pointers and thoughts on how to achieve them.

Austin Traffic is live

Kerlmax's first product, Austin Traffic, is an iPhone optimized listing of current traffic incidents in Austin, Texas. It just made it onto Apple's web apps directory.



I made Austin Traffic because all of the websites I found with this type of information are painfully slow to load on the iPhone. The City of Austin has a page of recent incidents but the text is too small to read and you have to scroll back and forth a lot because of this. Thankfully they provide an RSS feed and that's what I'm using to gather the information for my app. I have reformatted it for easier viewing and grouped the incidents by some of the major thoroughfares around town.

There is still more work to be done, but the web app is quite functional now and I wanted to let everyone else give it a try. Hopefully you find it as useful as I do.

Kerlmax now open for business

The doors are open. Please excuse our mess.

For some time now I have wanted to set up a side business so I could work on my own projects. This year I pulled the trigger and got things rolling. A few months ago I filed the necessary paperwork to start my own company, Kerlmax LLC. Right now it's just me, Isaac Wankerl, running the show (and I don't have any plans to change that unless the company becomes seriously successful). The company motto is Exciting and Intuitive Software and I hope that our upcoming products live up to it.

My first product (a free iPhone web application) is already out and within a month my flagship product should be finished and released. In the mean time I will also be working to clean up the website and get this blog formatted to my liking. Thanks for stopping by and come back soon!