DHKM is an Android app that allows you to check when the bus will be on your stop – live. It can locate you or you can select one of your favorite stops.
It was all done on a dare.
One after school afternoon I was going to do some shopping with my friend. The city of Białystok has recently introduced a system which would track the buses' locations and calculate when they'll arrive. We've talked and complained amongst ourselves that the interface is kinda clunky and that the site loads slowly and discussed how it would be better if there was an app for that. And that's when my friend said yeah, I bet you won't do it, though.
Well, me being me, I love a good challenge. I knew nothing about how to write an Android app. I sat down and started my research. A several hours (and one sleepless night) later I had a first prototype and was ready to show-off.
The app had a database of a total of four bus stops at this time, which was fine for the demo, but far from production-ready. My friend had to accept defeat, but was totally sold on how the app worked – all you had to do was to open it with the location enabled on your phone and it would find you. Demo wasn't that smart and worked off boundaries - each location was a square 50m wide.
At this point we invited one more friend into the project and started building – me focused on the app's core and functionality, Kamil responsible for the data and Mateusz, dealing with the user experience and testing.
Soon we were ready for the field tests – yeah, we actually rode around and verified if the app behaves as expected – logging the errors and fixing them afterwards.
Once the tests were complete, all the bugs fixed and database finally complete, we've updated the UI, launched the app on the Google Play Store and started promoting the app amongst students in our school. Soon we got our first downloads!
DHKM has been updated a few times since then, getting new features, bugfixes and massive UI overhauls, bringing it to it's current form. The project is still maintained, making it the longest running product of mine.
