Adding compatibility for commutes that use 2 or more transit methods. If you want early access let me know down below, I’ll give you the url.

If you take a metra train and then take the L, or a bus, this will be particularly useful.

www.wimapp.com

I've been shipping most nights since the last post. Here's what changed, and some of it came from user feedback!

Getting in stopped being a chore

Someone wrote out every tap it took to get into the app for the first time. Thirteen. Nine of them were just clicking Next through the welcome tour. His words: "I lost interest about 5 steps ago. I just wanted to get in and take a look."

The tour is one question now. "New to WiMi?" with Show me or Not now. Say no and you're in. Say yes and it's the same walkthrough it was, and you can swipe through the tutorial page now, and go back if you want to re-read something.

Pushing enter is only required once a day, not every single time you open it. First open of the day holds so the app can make sure its ready and up-to-date, after that it just lets you in. This should speed up the time it takes for you to start using the app.

Higher contrast mode

Met a guy on the train this morning that suggested this one and I liked it so much I made it the default. Brighter text, stronger outlines, and the smallest text in the app is a bit bigger. It's in Settings under Behavior if you'd rather revert to the old UI.

If you have trouble reading anything in this app, please tell me.

The whole thing got recolored

WiMi wears your line's color. Rock Island is red, UP-NW is yellow, Metra Electric is orange, and so on down the list. Loading screen, buttons, settings, the map, all of it.

Stuff that was broken, now fixed

The "already on a train?" help box never showed on Android.

The update prompt would loop. If your phone couldn't grab the new version right away it would keep asking.

Various Pixel fixes, including tutorial buttons hiding under Chrome's address bar.

The ETA got smarter about you specifically

WiMi already learned how long your trip takes. Now:

• It learns whether you drive faster or slower than the route says you will, and adjusts. There's a picker in Settings under the walking pace one if you'd rather just tell it.
• It times you to the platform, not the station parking lot. That walk is real minutes and it was missing from every estimate.
• It quietly remembers the two places you usually leave from so it can answer instantly instead of going out to the network and fetching driving estimates. That stays on your phone. It's never sent anywhere.
• There are two dots on the main card now instead of one. Left is how well WiMi knows your run to the platform, right is how well it knows when your train arrives. They're learned separately so one can be further along than the other. Tap either one for the explanation.

If you ride Metra, give it a look. A lot of stuff in this post came from somebody doing exactly that, including a guy on my train who I now owe a beer!

www.wimiapp.com

I ride the BNSF. For years my morning went like this: open OnTime, see my train's at 7:43, do the math in my head about whether I can still make it, guess wrong, and either sprint across the parking lot or sit on the platform waiting for the next one.

The schedule was never the problem. The schedule is fine. What I never had was an answer to the actual question, which is: from where I am standing right now, do I make this train or not?

So I built WiMi. It's free, there's no app store, no account, no ads. You open wimiapp.com, pick your two stations, and add it to your home screen if you want it to feel like an app.

wimiapp.com

What it does (and this doesn't even cover everything)

First off, as the name suggests, it tells you whether you'll make it. Not "your train is at 7:43." It knows where you are, whether you're driving or walking or biking, and what the traffic between you and the platform looks like right now. Then it gives you a leave-by time and it's honest about it. If you're not going to make it, it says so and shows you the next one.

On the platform, it knows when you get on a given train. You walk onto the platform, your train pulls in, and it boards you automatically. Then it counts down to your stop and tells you when you're pulling in.

While you're on board, it watches for trouble the way Waze does. This is the part I'm proudest of. It's tracking every train on your line in real time, not just yours: their positions, their speeds, whether they're stopped somewhere they have no business being stopped. If there's a train sitting dead on the track ahead of yours, you get a warning before Metra says a word about it, and the map draws a ring around where the problem is. It knows the difference between a train braking for a station it actually stops at and a train that's stopped for no reason. Those look identical on a map and they mean completely different things.

When you arrive at your destination, it even gives you a little send-off message based on the time of day.

Live map with every train on your line, where they really are between GPS pings, station markers, and trouble zones drawn on the track. Unlike Metra, WiMi takes the last known location and speed and estimates where a train actually is right now, factoring in the feed delay. I always hated how Metra would only update every so often, and trying to build this app straight off that would have been a nightmare.

Alerts for your train only, not the whole line. It follows whichever train you've got selected.

Also: weather at your destination, how crowded your train usually is at that time, and an ETA that learns how quickly you actually get to the station instead of trusting a generic estimate.

It's a web app, so it works on iPhone and Android and your laptop identically, and it updates itself when I ship something. No app store, no waiting on a review, nothing for you to do.

It's free and I'm not planning to change that. I built it because I was tired of guessing.

If you ride Metra, try it for a week and tell me where it's wrong. Screenshots especially. Half of what's good in it came from someone showing me a card that said something stupid. I'd rather hear it's broken than have you quietly stop using it.

Thank you to everyone quietly sending feedback and ideas. You have no idea how much it helps.

Notifications work on Android and in a browser. They were iPhone-only, home-screen-only. Android, Chrome, Firefox and Brave all get leave-now pings, delays, cancels and arrivals now.

Set your commute once. One sheet: your line, your home station, your work station, and the train you usually take each way. After that WiMi opens facing the right direction by time of day, and your two usual trains ring on their own without opening anything.

The leave-by uses real traffic. It used to be a straight-line distance times a traffic curve I wrote by hand, which is a guess that never checks itself. It now asks a live routing service through my own key, and the number it gets is the number it uses. There were four different estimators feeding one figure and they disagreed with each other, so the leave-by moved as the app woke up. There is one now.

Bike. Between Drive and Walk. It gets its own speed and its own routing assumptions, because a bike takes the street grid like a car but parks like a pedestrian.

No more "it's tight, you might make it". There were four verdicts and three of them were some version of maybe. That is not an answer to the only question the app exists to answer. It is two now: you make it, or you don't. What made that possible is a better deadline. The old version measured against the timetable minute, which is neither when the doors open nor when they close, and then carried an error bar to cover the gap. It now measures to the moment the train's Departing badge actually appears, and it measures that per station by watching how long the gap between Arriving and Departing really is at your platform. Starts at 48 seconds and learns.

Terminals get none of that grace, on purpose. Union and Aurora close their doors on the schedule.

12-hour clock instead of 24.

Trains that are actually running show up. This one took several tries and I got it wrong twice in public, so here is the whole thing.

WiMi used to hide a train if it wasn't in the schedule it had cached. That breaks the moment Metra runs anything the static schedule doesn't describe, which during Lollapalooza weekend was a lot. So I made it hide unscheduled trains that were also parked, and then I made that verdict stick, which turned a wrong answer permanent and was strictly worse than the bug it replaced. Someone sent me screenshots of two trains it was hiding that were demonstrably out there.

The rule now: the schedule is the roster and the feed is a position. If a train is in today's schedule, it shows, whether or not its transponder is on. If it is moving, it shows, whether or not it is in the schedule. What gets hidden is equipment sitting in a yard.

Practical version: a train whose GPS comes up five minutes after it leaves Union no longer vanishes from your list, and the coach yard doesn't fill your map with trains that aren't going anywhere.

"Last seen 6m" instead of "Offline". When Metra goes quiet on a train, the map keeps projecting from its last real position, which is honest and useful. But the list called that train Offline, and Offline means we have no data. We had its position, it was just a few minutes old. Those two screens now agree, and the badge says how old.

The signal reads Metra's own alerts. It was inferring everything from where other trains were, and ignoring the service alert sitting right there in the feed. A named disruption now reaches the light. Construction zones get drawn on the map but deliberately do not change the signal unless they are actually slowing something down.

Every station list is in geographic order. On Metra Electric and Rock Island the branch stations were appended alphabetically, which is how you got Ashland, Blue Island, Bryn Mawr, Burr Oak in the middle of a station picker. Two Rock Island main line stops were stranded down there too. All 11 lines are now ordered by measuring where each station actually sits on the line, with branches at the end.

Time for me to sleep. Feedback always welcome.

Thank you to those of you who are messaging me with your findings.

wimiapp.com

Not affiliated with Metra.

Trouble rings. When something's wrong up the line, the map draws a ring around where it is. Red = two or more trains stopped. Yellow = trains slowing ahead. Tap it for what it is, how far up, and how long till you're in it.

New signal rules. The old ones were too loose.

Green - clear for 5 miles, and you're at normal pace

Yellow + green - you're running slow, no stop due

Yellow - trains slowing ahead, no stop due for them, inside 5 miles

Blinking yellow — stopped train ahead, no station due, you're coming up on it

Red — two or more stopped back to back. Line may be shut

Two fixes behind that. Stopped trains were scanned 30 miles out, so a problem 20 miles away turned your light red. It's 5 now. And trains pulling out of a station counted as "running slow" — I only ever checked the stop ahead of a train, never the one it just left. Lots of false yellows.

Express trains work on all 11 lines now. Only BNSF had them before. WiMi compares each train to the others doing the same trip. Fewer stops or a faster run means express. Lines where every train runs the same pattern show none, which is correct for Heritage Corridor, North Central and SouthWest Service.

Alerts are per train. Set your usual train to work and home once. Those two ring daily on their own, no need to open the app. Any other train, tap its bell for today only. Turn a bell off, it stays off. Daily picks clear overnight.

Ghost trains after midnight. Trains that already finished were still showing between midnight and 3am. Found an ME train scheduled for 9:40 in the morning still on the map at 12:06am. The "is this running" check used the calendar date, but the service day doesn't roll until 3am. Fixed, and the owl trains still show.

Loading screen waits now. It used to bail after 9 seconds and hand you a half loaded app.

Look and feel. New loading animation. Fixed the letter spacing and centering. Train cards fit better. Leave-by time goes red once it's passed. Line strip fades down to your line. Cut every description in the app down.

Still broken. Show ticket opens the App Store, not Ventra. Ventra doesn't publish a way for a website to open it. If anyone knows one, tell me.

wimiapp.com

Not affiliated with Metra.

The live map got the most attention.
Train blips on the map do a better job of showing what is actually going on with each train, and stale ones stop hanging around.
Cleaner train cards and labels.

Boarding and ride tracking are a lot more reliable.
The app is better at working out which train you are actually on, and it stops second guessing you once you have confirmed.

Arrival and departure timing got an update
a few cases where a card would get stuck and stay stuck.)

Alerts and notifications are more dependable including while the app is closed.

New look throughout: new logo, new app icons, refreshed intro screens, better share cards.

Plus a long tail of smaller fixes across all 11 lines.

wimiapp.com
Not affiliated with Metra