Contributing

Transportr is developed entirely by volunteers who like what they are doing. Contributions should be fun. They are both encouraged and appreciated.

There are many possible ways to contribute and for most of them you don’t need to know how to program. Have a look at the options below and just get started! :)

Tell the world!

The easiest way to contribute to Transportr is to tell everybody about it. You can post about it on social media or even better show your friends and family that it exists and how to use it.

The more users Transportr has, the more developers it will attract and the better it will become.

Another way to help is to rate it in Google Play and if you have a little more time also write a short review about it.

Finding and Reporting Bugs

Every software has bugs. So does Transportr. If you ever find it to behave in a way you would not expect it to, please have a look at the list of open and closed issues to see if it already has been reported.

If the bug you have found is not reported already, please create a new issue and describe what exactly you did to produce the faulty behavior. Screenshots are always welcome to illustrate your description.

Testing Beta Releases

If you feel adventurous, you can test new versions of Transportr before they are released to the general public. These are made available via a special software repository for F-Droid. So please install F-Droid first and then follow these instructions for adding the repository to it. If you installed Transportr via the official F-Droid repository, you will need to uninstall it before you can install the one from the testing repository, because they are signed with different keys. Please note that you will lose all saved data when you uninstall Transportr.

If you are getting Transportr from Google Play, you can join the beta program there.

Design and Graphics

Transportr should look pretty. People with design skills are encouraged to contribute those and help making Transportr look even better.

Transport Network Logos

Each transport network has its own logo. For some transport networks Transportr still doesn’t have a logo, but shows a placeholder instead.

In the past, Transportr was using raster graphics in PNG format. Now, we are only accepting vector graphics and suggest to start with creating an SVG file for the logo. SVG files are collected in /artwork/networks. They further need to be converted into the Android vector format and must be placed in /res/drawable. There is tools on the internet that allow you to do this: svg2android or SvgToVectorDrawableConverter

The name of the file should always be network_X_logo.xml where X is the short ID of the network in Transportr in lower case. Here is an example of Italy (it).

Ideally, you send in logo graphics with a Pull Request in Github. See Working with the Source code for more information. Alternatively, you can create a new issue in GitHub and just drag and drop the graphics in there.

Since Transportr offers a dark and a light theme, transparent backgrounds usually do not work for the logo. Please try the logo on black and white backgrounds first. If it does not work, just use a white background.

Translating Into Your Language

Translating Transportr is very easy. Just sign up for an account at Transifex. After you are logged in, go to the Transportr translation project. There you can click the “Request language” button if your language does not exist, or if you want to improve existing translations, apply for the respective language team.

What you translate there will then be included in the next release of Transportr.

Please use the “Create Issue” feature of Transifex only if absolutely necessary. If you think that the original text needs to be changed, you can edit this file and submit a pull request.

Adding Support For More Regions

Ideally, Transportr will support the whole world some day. To achieve this, we rely on you to add support for more public transport networks. Transportr uses the public transport enabler library to access transport data. This library is the place where you need to add new transport networks. This way not only Transportr will benefit from your work, but also other apps using this library.

Using GTFS

The easiest way to add your area to Transportr is to check if its data is already included in Navitia. If it is not there, you can check if your public transportation agencies are already providing their data to Google. There is a long list that you can consult. If you find your city there, a General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) already exists for it. In the best case, this GTFS data is also published somewhere. Find out where it is published and then just contact Navitia for them to make this data available via their free web service API. If they stopped adding new areas, you can also host your own Navitia server since it is fully Free Software. Transportr can use the Navitia API on whichever server to work in your area.

If the GTFS data exists, but is not published, please contact your public transport agencies and convince them to publish this data. A public service for the people should embrace Open Data and publish its data.

So the data of your area is in Navitia already, that’s great! Now there’s just two steps missing of getting it into Transportr. Unfortunately, for those steps it is helpful to know how to use git and Java. But even if don’t know those, getting the preconditions from above ready will help the next person to do it.

Adding it to Transportr

The first step is to get support for the area into the public transport enabler. Here’s two examples from the past: Ontario and South-West of France.

Pull requests to this library are only accepted if they meet the highest quality standards. For this reason, some people have started a staging repository for public transport enabler. If your pull request does not get merged quickly, you can ask for it to be included in the staging repository. Once it landed there, it can already be used in Transportr.

After your pull request has been accepted, you can move on to adding the last final bit to Transportr. Here’s one example: Hungary. Once this pull request has been accepted as well, your area will be included in the next Transportr release.

Other Options

In case your public transport agency is not working with Google and does not have GTFS data available for others to use, you can still check whether their system is based on HAFAS, EFA or TSI. Support for these systems is already in the public transport enabler, so it is probably easy to add your area.

If this also doesn’t help you and you really want to see your area supported, you can create a GTFS file for it yourself. For this, it is helpful if you at least have access to schedule information in some form and know where the stops and lines are. The osm2gtfs script gets the latter information from OpenStreetMap and assists you with creating GTFS.

Check out the video below for one example of making your own GTFS feed using osm2gtfs.

[ OGG version | PDF Slides ]

Working with the Source Code

If you want to start working on Transportr’s code and if you haven’t done already, you should familiarize yourself with Android development and set up a development environment.

The next step is to clone the source code repository. More information about building from source is available on GitHub.

If you want to do more than fixing bugs, please create an issue for the feature you want to work on before doing any major work, so that other developers know about your plans, can coordinate, prevent duplicated work and discuss the best approach for your undertaking.

Missing features are documented in the issue tracker. Feel free to look there for ideas or to add your own.

There is also a list of beginner tasks for you to get started easily.

Free Software (Open Source)

This app is Free Software. It means that you are free to use, study, share and improve it. Its source code is public and can be inspected by everyone to make sure it only really does what it is supposed to do. This app respects your privacy and your freedom.

Legally, you are allowed to redistribute and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.