So another week of work goes by, and along with that a miniature world of delays and problems on the tube. I can hear you now, “well what’s new about that one?”, unfortunately as im learning very quickly that this isn’t some freak occurrence that the tubes don’t run on time and can’t be relied on for keeping time or even running. So, to combat this situation, and hopefully make my life a little easier I knocked up a little app to get the service status of the London Underground from the Transport For London web-site and display it in, yeah you guessed it, a client side application!

Again, it all started off being very simple, but then progressed and gained features. Currently it fetches the service status every 5minutes which is configurable via the command line when you start the program. For example..

tlu-status.exe 60

…would mean it goes and fetches the data every 60 seconds. Although I wouldn’t recommend you set it that low, I think the TFL webmaster might have something to say about it otherwise. Again, like the other apps I have created so far, they minimise to the tray, as I don’t see a reason for a background program to remain on the task bar other than when your using it. So for those who are interested in seeing this wonderfully uselessful app…

I have already has people asking why I made this into a app if the information is already available on the internet? Well.. I’m lazy and I can’t be arsed to load up a web-site if I want status updates, I just want it on my desktop, always being available quickly. It also means I can just put it on another screen, and glance at it occasionally during the day to see how things are going.

Download Links

TLU Status (937kb) – (Sorry, this doesn’t work any more since they changed their website)