Nenuzo 2.0 - Releasing soon!

Nenuzo is finally getting train support!

Nenuzo is finally getting train support. For real. I mentioned this back in June, but it took me a while to actually get around to actually building this out.

Make no mistake, I was planning this feature in April, before the app was even released, but I stuck with just research initially and focused on bus times.

Initially, I was just going to leave it be and have single-leg buses and single-leg trains supported. At the time, I figured that was a sufficient improvement to make. It was definitely a good improvement to make, but I felt like maybe I should actually investigate whether I could do more.

Within a relatively short period of time, I'd done some research and found out that there's a wonderful tool called 'MOTIS'. This is a server-side tool which helps plan multi-leg and multi-modal journeys, as long as you have data sources. We already had bus data, and my rail research had given me the rail data too. I did have some concerns with this. For example, everything I'd read in years past told me that doing multi-modal and multi-leg journey across entire countries required very beefy servers, with 64GB of RAM or more and very resource-heavy processing phase.

Turns out that's not necessarily a hard-requirement, and you can get away with less. With MOTIS, feeding the national rail and bus datasets, it's actually quite reserved can can use something like 6 - 8GB. I suppose worldwide processing would require significantly more and maybe that's what I remember.

So, the next version of Nenuzo (which may be the current or a past version by the time you read this) supports multi-modal and multi-leg journeys. Want to go from Bristol to Glasgow? No problem. Got a bus to catch followed by a train? Yep, also possible.

I didn't stop there though. One of the features I wanted in the original transport app that I built ('Panther') back in 2018 was support for notifications. Specifically, I wanted to know if my train was delayed because being able to plan for that would have either left me less stressed, or less out of breathe, (and often both). So I've added 'commutes'. This is a feature which lets you receive tracking and notifications about your regular journeys - think your commute to and from work, regular travel to see friends, etc.

The core premise of the transport apps I've been building has always been to get from A to B as easily as possible. All these features have been built to enable that further, but they did expose some limitations in the existing app, primarily in the UI. With that, Nenuzo 2.0 features a huge overhaul of the design to make it easier to use.

With all of this said, I'm pleased to say that Nenuzo 2.0 is now in the Apple app store review process. I don't know when it'll be approved or released, but hopefully within the next few days. This has been months of research, testing, and refinement, and I'm eager to see it live as soon as possible.

Am I done building Nenuzo?

Absolutely not. Although 2.0 isn't even live yet, I'm already planning out and building the next set of features. I'm not ready to announce those yet, but they're designed to make it even easier to get from A to B. The core experience for everything we need is there in 2.0, and the next set of features will be building upon this.

I absolutely don't know when this future version will release. With rail, I spent a few months testing it to see if it held up in the real world, refining as I went. These new features aren't a complete overhaul like planning and train data was, but I still want to do actual testing based on my own real experiences. That's the only way I can genuinely figure out if features 'fit'.

What about Android?

I keep saying that I'll make an Android version a reality someday, but I'm so focused on testing with my daily driver (an iPhone) that I decide that Android can wait. There's many different flavours of Android, and I have no doubt that there'll be some specific manufacturer where things turn out wonky.