Knowing public transportation schedules is something every urbanite should have as a second nature. I’ve been impressed by a few people that can fire off connecting bus lines without even thinking, even telling you what time increments they arrive in. I need an iPhone for these kinds of things! Luckily there are a handful apps that serve exactly this purpose, and Routesy happens to be the most polished of them.

The user interface is quite nice when compared to their web brothers and sisters like nextmuni or munitime. Upon launch you’re presented with all of the MUNI lines (whether they are in service or not) and you can simply scroll through them to find the line you want to take. Once a line is selected, Location Services will kick in and estimate the intersection nearest to you to board that bus. Underneath that nearest stop, you find all of the subsequent stops on that line with their approximation in distance. One confusing element: the listing of other stops aren’t necessarily in the order the bus travels in, so watch out! Selecting a bus line yields a page with how long you’ll have to wait for the next three buses along with a map that can also be viewed in iPhone’s Google Maps app.

Routesy is very handy for those who live and die by public transportation in San Francisco. It’s very convenient – knowing whether or not I have to rush to catch a bus is a handy tool indeed. A few features I think would be useful if added are the ability to bookmark certain lines or stops, and the capability of entering in a start and end point to have Routesy spit back a public transit itinerary. Sometimes the app crashes on launch, seemingly tied to how good of a data connection the iPhone has: the app is snappy on wifi, but if EDGE is weak it’ll take a couple of launches to get it going. However, this still beats waiting for a web based app to load all of the content.

At 2.99 I think Routesy is only attractive to the niche that is on San Francisco MUNI every day. For a guy like me that doesn’t have a car and rarely leaves the city limits, I find it worth the price, but if you’re coming to SF for a visit it might be better to use a web based app and save the bus fare!

Where To is one of those why didn’t I think of that applications. The app provides a categorized directory for searching Google Maps. The idea is simple, and the execution is nearly perfect.

Where To adds a feature to the iPhone that brings it closer to a full GPS device. The main function of the app is to present you with a tree of categorized search terms to be fed into Google Maps. You select from the top level 11 categories that include sections such as Entertainment, Emergency services, Food & Drink. From there you are presented with sub categories such as Movie Theaters, Auto Repair, and Pizza Places.

Once a sub category is selected you have the option to search from your current location which utilizes the built in GPS, from a pre-specified point on the map, or from the location of any of your contacts.

One of the more interesting features is only available under certain sub-categories. For instance Food & Drink > Pizza. From there you can select a chain of pizza places that the program knows about to search for just that pizza place. This feature is only available in a few of the sub-categories, mainly under Food & Drink.

The application features a favorites feature that allows you to add any sub-category to a list that can save you a click here or there by showing you all of your favorites, across categories, in one list.

The only real negative I can find with this application is that you can’t add additional categories to the lists. This, I think, would be a great feature addition.

This application is absolutely beautifully crafted, works very well, and is surprisingly convenient and useful. While you would think you could just type in the search terms into Google Maps, this program makes it a 2-3 tap operation and saves you time.