London Tube Deluxe

An almost perfect iPhone application, TubeDeluxe’s few minor flaws can be almost ignored in the swell of superbly implemented features that have real world implications and uses. Quite simply, this is the definitive guide to London’s tube and overland rail system, with real time updates, planning features, maps and timetables, all neatly wrapped in an interface that’s intuitive and which follows Apple’s style guidelines.

The opening screen sets the scene, with a neat overview of the status of each tube line. Don’t worry about your preferred lines being way off the bottom of the scrollable list – one tap of ‘Edit’ and you can drag and drop the lines around into any order you like. And tapping on a ‘problem’ line gives details and times, as needed. Map is, of course, the world famous London tube schematic, here beautifully implemented with Safari-like kinetic scrolling and a limited amount of pinch-zooming control, with a search box on hand to help you find a specific station.

Then we have actual route planning. This is traditionally done by eye on the aforementioned map, but why do the work when there’s a function built-in to do it for you? ‘From’ and ‘To’ stations are quickmatched and then one tap on ‘Itinerary’ produces the quickest route, with an estimate of the time required. Calculation of the route isn’t instant, but it’s only a handful of seconds and understandable given the number of possible routes in such a complex tube system.

And so on to the first minor imperfection. With an itinerary on screen, tap on ‘On Tube Map’ and up pops the main map again, with your start, finish and line change points each ringed. However, you’d expect ‘Move next’ to step through the stations you pass through, one at a time, so that you can see the actual route taken. As it is, this merely moves you to the next change point, or to your destination, often a big jump that’s almost worthless in terms of getting a feel for which way the app wants you to go.

‘Departures’ lets you drill down, line by line, station by station, to live departure ‘Next train…’ times, all fetched in real time from the appropriate London Transport servers. This is impressive but doesn’t always work – choosing ‘The Circle Line’ and ‘Paddington’, the busiest tube line and largest mainline and tube station, produced ‘No departures’, for example.

However, the application is firmly back on track (get it?) with the final panel, ‘Locate’. This uses the iPhone’s built-in positioning fix, showing you your nearest London underground network stations, sorted by distance. For each, you can, for example, check departure times and (optionally) switch over to Google Maps with the station pre-found, for road route planning.

Almost perfect then, but none of the minor negatives warrant me knocking off a star in Tube Deluxe’s rating. Recommended.