Mass transit is a great thing, and TheBus does great, nationally recognized work.

But I’ve never had much fun waiting around for the bus, back when I was a transit rider. The minutes ticked on by as I always stared longingly for my ride. Fortunately, Oahu Transit Services has had a fully functional Web app at hea.thebus.org to help riders plan their commutes.

Now there’s a new iPhone app developed by a city employee to further aid users. The app, which is free, is called DaBus.

Andy Yip, a developer for the city Department of Information Technology, and Jane Zeng, a DIT webmaster and graphic designer, in January competed in the city’s first Hackathon, a competition to develop apps around available city data.

"That’s when we did a lot of the work, it was purely for competition," Yip says. "But it turned out well. We won, and that’s when the momentum moved and we wanted to publish this. It seemed to be pretty functional and usable."

Oahu Transit Services made its application programming interface, or API, available so third parties can access the raw data, says Roger Morton, president of OTS.

"My understanding is that we are the first agency that has made our data available by API for third parties to come in," Morton says. "They gotta sign up with us, tell us what they want to do. We want to make sure we control part of it, but if you agree to that, we will give you access to integrate your application with our services."

DaBus app offers real-time bus arrival information, tracks the current location of your bus, bookmarks favorite bus stops and explores different routes.

Yip says he is constantly working to refine the app.

"I really hope the public likes it," he says. And that seems to be the case: I see a lot of positive Facebook feedback from my friends, and the app has five five-star reviews on iTunes.

TheBus isn’t stopping there, Morton says. OTS is working with Google to integrate the tech giant’s all-encompassing Maps system into TheBus. It’s called Google Live Transit Maps, and Morton says only three U.S. cities and one in Europe use it. "We’re hoping to be one of the early adopters."

So after all that, the most important question I had for Yip was this: On behalf of myself and other Android users, any future plans to develop an Android app?

"Right now I’m focused primarily on the iPhone," says Yip, adding it’s not planned for the immediate future.

Shucks. I guess that’s another thing I have to wait around for.

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Reach Gene Park at gpark@staradvertiser.com or Twitter as@genepark.