BETA UPDATE

5/22/2024

New EL Tracker Features just dropped!


Now you can receive notifications for your favorite stations/lines.  We heard from our testers that the CTA's elevator alerts text service is unreliable and oftentimes doesn't send any alerts at all.  Now we offer push notifications that will alert you as soon as a train is delayed or a elevator breaks down.  There are two options for this: one that sends you notifications for your selected favorites, and one that sends full system alerts for CTA nerds like us.


The aforementioned selected favorites now include customizations for favorite lines.  We understand that, for orange line riders (for example), seeing various other colors on a widget with only three arrivals is unhelpful.  At stations like Clark/Lake, other lines can clog the widget so you might not be getting any relevant information.  This customization also streamlines alerts so you can quickly hear about relevant delays. 


Another update we made was allowing users to decide to see arrivals by minutes (Due, 2 mins, 5 mins, etc) or by time (3:45, 3:47, 3:50, etc).  We also made some minor updates to the map, and fixed some formatting issues for legacy iOS users.


Lastly, the update we are most excited about: SmartWalk.  Thank you to our tester who suggested this, we have gotten extremely positive feedback about this feature that uses your walking time to show relevant arrivals on the widget.  For anyone with, for example, a 10 minute walk to the nearest station, seeing arrivals 2 minutes or even 7 minutes away isn't helpful information, and actually just wastes space and defeats the purpose of the smaller widgets.  And if the widget isn't showing relevant arrival times, what's the point?  Between favorite lines, the closest station widget, and SmartWalk, we can guarantee that you are getting the most relevant possible information directly on your phone's home screen.


We want to say thank you for the outpouring of support, particularly from the folks on r/CTA and the folks at Chi Hack Night.  Another huge thank you to the first few people who donated to help us cover the cost of running and maintaining the app.  We received a lot of enthusiasm and great suggestions, and had over 350 downloads through TestFlight.  We are now on our last beta test update, just to make sure everything is working smoothly before we release EL Tracker to the public!