Hasta La Gadget!

BusChecker: Helping drunken Londoners get home on time since 2011

Fact 1: When traveling home on the London night bus, its easy to nod off and miss your stop, especially if you are a bartender and go out drinking after work until 3AM. Fact 2: I was this bartender. Fact 3: Once I even managed to spend the whole night on the N73, going back and forth and only waking when the engine sputtered out in the Walthamstow bus garage at 7AM, further from home than when I’d started hours before.

I could probably have done with BusChecker.

BusChecker is an iPhone app which gives live countdowns telling you when your bus will arrive, and also shows the buses on a map, pulling data from Transport for London’s live tracking site. And the latest version will wake you up when you reach your stop.

Just tell it where you want to go, and nod off. Thanks to iOS5’s new region-mapping feature, the low-powered position-monitoring service that lets you use Find My Friends and location based reminders, BusChecker can sound an alarm when you get to your stop.

I could have done with this ten years ago, when I regularly spent hours sleeping on a bus that could have been spent in a bed. Then again, ten years ago I was carrying a Sony Ericsson P800, which had trouble not crashing a plain old maps app.

BusChecker is $3, available now.

BusChecker product page [BusChecker. Thanks,Carl!]

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