TABOR

_{Yutong U12 #1971, the bus on the app icon. Photo by J2 kolej, CC BY-SA 4.0, cut into a sticker by TABOR.}

"Tabor" is Polish for rolling stock. Warsaw runs about 2 700 buses and trams, split across 76 models. Some models have hundreds of vehicles, and some have four. Every vehicle carries a fleet number, and the ZTM database says which model each number belongs to. So a photo of a bus is enough to know exactly what you've seen, and a list of every number is enough to know what you haven't.

TABOR does both halves. CATCH reads the fleet number on-device while you frame the shot. BOOK files the vehicle under its model and batch. HUNT shows every vehicle you haven't caught yet, live, on a map. ME keeps the score.

There's no App Store build (yet 👀). Open the project in Xcode 27 and run it on your phone:

open Tabor.xcodeproj

Set your own team under Signing & Capabilities for both the Tabor and TaborControls targets. A free personal team works; that's also why there's no iCloud sync (see Your book).

The live map and the live-assisted number reading need a key for Warsaw's open data API. It's free from api.um.warszawa.pl. Put it in a new, gitignored file next to Config/Tabor.xcconfig:

echo 'TABOR_UM_KEY = your-key-here' > Config/Secrets.xcconfig

Without a key the app still builds and catches work. HUNT stays empty until you paste a key into Settings › Live data.

• The number is read while you frame the shot. Vision's text recogniser looks at about five frames a second. A number only counts once it has won three of the last six frames, so one bad frame can't lock the wrong one. Once it locks, the brackets tighten and turn yellow, the pill says which model it is and which year its batch was built, and the phone gives one click (two if you've never seen that vehicle).
• Only fleet numbers count. A photo of a bus is full of other digits: line numbers, times on the destination display, and the registration plate.
  • Runs glued to letters are dropped, and so are runs after a two- or three-letter county code (WX 2043F, WPI 12345). "Nr 1974" still counts.
  • Times and decimals (20:15, 3.14) are dropped.
  • A number the database doesn't know is only kept if it's four digits long.
• It knows what's around you. With a location fix and the live feed, a number that belongs to a vehicle within 300 m gets a boost. If the read is one digit off a vehicle within 150 m (OCR turning 4235 into 1235), that vehicle is offered too. When a number belongs to both a bus and a tram, whichever one is actually nearby settles it, and the catch gets its line number from the feed.
• BUS / TRAM / AUTO is a preference, not a filter. A bus number read in TRAM mode still matches the bus. Spotters forget to switch back.
• The shot is what you framed. The viewfinder is a 3:2 photo frame, and the saved shot is cropped to it. Zoom has one button per real lens (0.5×, 1×, 2×, 5× on a 16 Pro), so 5× is the telephoto rather than a crop of the main lens, and the phone clicks as you cross from one lens to the next.
• Or import one. A photo from the library works too, with its own date and place from the EXIF data. It doesn't touch today's streak. Reading a still image takes longer: if the whole frame gives nothing, it's read again as nine overlapping tiles, so a small number on a whole-vehicle shot has enough pixels.
• Wrong read? The correction sheet takes a number, a model and a line. It lists the database's matches first. A model you pick by hand is remembered for that number, but only when it disagrees with ZTM.

This is the screenshot at the top. The photo develops while the vehicle is lifted off the background. That's the same subject-lifting model as the Photos app, running on the phone. It gets a thick white border that follows its outline, and the sticker slams down with a haptic pattern that gets longer the rarer the model is. A COMMON lands with one thunk. A LEGENDARY builds up in step with its glow, hits on the frame you see it land, and ends in sparks.

A line underneath says what the catch means for your book:

One more — 1987 — and the 2024 batch is done.

Hold the sticker to peel it off the backing and stick it in the book.

_{Everything uncaught within 3 km, rarest first: the Irizar on trial is 1.3 km off and coming.
One vehicle, and whether it's coming your way. And filtered down to one model: every
Yutong U12 out in the city right now, nearest first.}

Every bus and tram you haven't caught, from Warsaw's live GPS feed, refreshed every 15 seconds while the map is on screen, and never in the background.

• Two kinds of marker. A vehicle on its own is a tag with its line number. Vehicles that would overlap become one bubble with a count. Filled means a model you don't have yet, and outlined means a model you have but not this vehicle. The colour is always the tier.
• Groups hold still. The bubbles are fixed squares on the map, not clusters around the vehicles, so they don't jump about every 15 seconds as the buses move. They only regroup when you really zoom.
• Which way it's going. The feed only says where a vehicle is. So TABOR keeps the last five minutes of positions and draws an arrow once a vehicle has gone 30 m. The card says whether it's coming your way, going past, heading away or stopped.
• A wanted list. The filter takes whole tiers or particular models. While it's on, HUNT searches the whole city, not just the 3 km around you, and sorts by distance: if you're after one particular model, how far away it is matters most.
• Rarest first. Unfiltered, the list shows models you don't have yet first, then goes by rarity, then by distance. Vintage and test vehicles sit at the end of the book, but one that's actually out running is as rare a sight as a LEGENDARY, so HUNT ranks them with the legendaries.

Every model, with every vehicle ZTM lists, split into batches by build year and depot:

2024 BATCH · R-1 WORONICZA · 1970—1987

Owned stickers come first, then the gaps. A batch turns green once you have the whole batch.

Rarity is fleet size and nothing else. There's no guessing at how often a model runs. VINTAGE and ON TEST are tiers of their own, whatever their size, and neither counts toward the fleet percentage or the "complete a tier" badges. They aren't rare, they're seasonal or passing through.

A vehicle's page has its age, when you first saw it, how many times you've seen it, and every sighting: when, where (district and street), and which line it was on. Swipe a sighting to fix its number, model or line, or delete it.

• The trophy shelf: your three rarest stickers. Then caught, the fleet share (to one decimal place under 10%, so the first few hundred catches visibly move it), the day streak, and how many depots you've caught vehicles from.
• 52 badges, drawn as struck coins. Drag one to spin it: it has a rim and an engraved back, and the phone clicks on every quarter turn. Some are tiered, from bronze up to platinum (Collector, Fleet share, Line hopper, Photographer). Others are for one thing: Unicorn (the only vehicle of its model in Warsaw), Twins (back-to-back fleet numbers), Double life (a bus and a tram with the same number), Rainbow day, Every district, one badge per depot. A few stay secret until you earn them.
• Weather badges (snow, rain, heatwave, deep freeze, a thunderstorm) look up each geotagged catch in Open-Meteo's archive afterwards. That's the one thing TABOR sends off the phone: a catch's time and its rough position (to about 1 km). It can be switched off in Settings.
• Share a catch as a 4:5 card: the sticker under a spotlight in its tier's colour, the number tag, and where and on which line you caught it.

• A Home and Lock Screen widget with your streak, how many vehicles you've caught out of the fleet, and your latest sticker.
• A catch control for Control Center, the Lock Screen and the Action button, which opens straight into the camera. "Catch a vehicle" is also in Siri, Spotlight and Shortcuts.

Tabor/Resources/fleet.json is built by scripts/fetch_fleet.py from the ZTM vehicle database. On top of that come hand-kept lists for what the database doesn't have yet or has wrong: new deliveries already running, buses on trial, club-owned vintage buses, retired vehicles still listed, and vehicles filed under the wrong model. The script's header explains each list.

python3 scripts/fetch_fleet.py --offline

Rebuilds from the saved scrape in data/ in seconds. Leave out --offline to scrape ZTM again, which takes a while. ZTM blocks GitHub's runners, so the scrape runs from a home connection, not in CI.

New buses don't need an app update. The app checks this repo's main for a newer fleet.json once a day and uses it from the next launch. A downloaded copy only wins while it's newer than the one built into the app, so an app update with fresher data is never overridden by an old download. Settings can turn the check off.

Hand-added numbers come from a source (Warszawikia, TransInfo, the KMKM club, phototrans.eu) or were seen live on the feed. None are filled in from an order size. As soon as ZTM lists a number itself, ZTM's row wins and the hand-added one drops out. Every source is credited at the bottom of the book.

It lives on the phone and nowhere else: there's no account and no server. iCloud sync needs a CloudKit entitlement, which a personal signing team can't have. Settings › Backup exports the whole book as a ZIP: every sighting, photo, sticker and hand-picked model. Importing a backup only adds what's missing, so importing the same file twice changes nothing.

Location is only used while the app is on screen: it geotags a catch and tells HUNT and the camera what's nearby. There's no background location mode at all.

Debug mode (Settings) saves every shot to Files › On My iPhone › TABOR › Debug, including failed reads and retakes. Each shot is saved with the photo, the sticker and what the OCR, the live feed and the sticker cutter made of it. With debug mode on, long-pressing a caught sticker in the book deletes it.

The matching, OCR filtering, stats, badges, live feed parsing and backup logic in Tabor/Core doesn't depend on the iPhone. It also builds as a Swift package, so it's tested on a Mac in about a second:

swift test