The Train Throttle Blog

While doing absolutely nothing important, I ran across a video of someone who posted a video of the view of their layout from the cab of an engine.

That's pretty cool I thought to myself. For a while, another Withrottle app has had the ability to take photos from within the app. While it's a neat idea, I never really understood what it would bring to the experience that the default camera app couldn't.

But this, seeing the video - it was a "Eureka!" moment. The collaboration between myself and Tom of ChooChooVision started around 10pm, and by 3am I had a working prototype. This is the power of SwiftUI, a well architected application, and an awesome dev ;)...

It's time for a new feature drop! Custom Button Colors!

Seriously, they may be the most exciting things since sliced bread. Available to anyone who bought or subscribed to the app.

Til next time —...

I got out some older trains this past weekend, and one of them was a trolley. My thoughts immediately turned to using the shuttle mode, when I realized something - this particular trolley has a "stop requested" feature, where you can press the "7" button on your DCC controller and it will stop, play some sounds, and start up again. How cool is that‽ I know that some MTH engines also have this feature too.

It's fundamentially at odds with my shuttle mode, and yet it seems like it should compliment shuttle mode. Off to xcode I go - I will add another mode, a "play a sound every X seconds" mode, so my trolley can pick up people when it feels like it. It will be similar to shuttle mode, but won't stop or reverse the train. I think it will be really cool.

Expect this release to hit the app store sometime in September....