UK iPhone

When the National Rail Enquiries iPhone app debuted at £5, it came in for some criticism from rail users used to free train info apps. But the company behind the app, Agant Ltd, have strongly defended their right to make money from providing a quality app, and have pointed out that others are free to make apps using the same data that they license from NRE. They also point out that there are free apps available still.

The best free app that we have found is the Trainline one. Presumably it can be offered free because it supports purchases of tickets from theTrainline.com. The Trainline app is a competent journey planner, able to plan trips using either an alphabetical list of stations, or your nearest station (using the iPhone location service). You can see maps of the stations on Google Maps. The journey details screen includes a button to search for that leg on Twitter, for no easily apparent reason, and there is a handy “next train home” button on the main screen, which uses iPhone location and your previously entered home station to calculate the quickest route home from your nearest station.

The whole thing works reasonably well, without being strikingly brilliant, but then it is free! Get it here:

The National Rail Enquiries (NRE) app also has a very competent journey planner, including Google map locations, and the legs that traverse the Tube have detailed descriptions of lines and platforms. It also has a “next train home” button, and in general has a well-engineered feel to it; using it is easy and intuitive, like using an Apple app.

National Rail Enquiries app

If that were all there were to it, though, you’d be hard-pressed to justify spending money on it when the Trainline app is free and does the same thing, albeit a bit less elegantly. But the NRE app does have another feature: live departures and arrivals. Your chosen home station appears top of the list on the home screen, and you can select any other station as well. The live screen loads incredibly quickly, showing a series of trains, and tapping on a train gives a really nice display of the entire line, with your station highlighted in blue, and the train itself shown as a gently radiating blue dot as it moves down the line. Really nicely done, and a fine example of the attention to detail shown throughout the app.

If £5 is really a big deal to you, and you’re happy to do without the live departures and arrivals board and live progress, then the Trainline app is a workable make-do. But if I travelled regularly on mainline trains, I’d buy the NRE app in a second. iPhone users are generally people who are able and willing to spend a bit to get a really nice user experience (otherwise you’d be using a WinMobile phone, no?) and so it really shouldn’t be a problem to spring for it. Get it here:

If you don’t use mainline trains, but are stuck on the Tube most workdays, the best Tube app for us is TubeDeluxe. Get it here:

And if you take the same train every day, you know where to stand on the platform to get the carriage that’s closest to the exit on arrival. But what if you need to catch a different train? The brilliant Tube Exits app shows you where to stand for every conceivable train journey:

I was really pleased to see that the excellent Dropbox has released an app for the iPhone. I’ve been using Dropbox for ages, and it’s a brilliant solution to the problem of working on more than one device (eg home computer, work computer, laptop, iPhone). Dropbox automatically and seamlessly synchronises files that you put into your Dropbox directory across all devices. To use it, you just sign up for an account (free or paid) and then download the software and install it on all the machines you want to use it on. There are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, and now your iPhone.

Each installation creates a Dropbox directory on that machine. Anything you put into that directory appears, virtually instantly, on your other machines. Synching happens in the background, automatically. Dropbox also saves your files onto its servers, and there is a web interface to manage those files directly. So even if you find yourself on a machine that you haven’t installed Dropbox to, you can still download your files via the web!

The free plan includes a very generous amount of online storage, which you can increase by upgrading to paid.

The iPhone app is of course free, but you’ll need an account to use it. You can sign up for a free account here.