Åbo

Quite often when there is some nice API for something, the obvious application type seem to be a mobile application or somekind of web site/app. That is all quite nice and all but sometimes you just need a simple tool. Probably most Linux (or unix) user spend most of their time in a terminal so why not make some tiny command line utilities instead ? My latest little project is all about the command line.

Tools to query Turku Region public transport data from the command line, fast and much more efficient than opening a browser, finding the site and all that. For now there are two tools:

• one for the bike rental system showing real-time statistics about bike availability at the stations
• and one for real-time bus stop departure information

These tools are simple and compact, written in C with a little help from curl and json-c. And of course everything is open source and on github.