App Store

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App Store

Dale Zak organized the first Hackathon last July in Halifax which produced two apps, Wish You Were Here supporting Feed Nova Scotia and Meet Me Here, supporting Phoenix Youth. This year we had events in Halifax, Saskatoon and Montreal with teams working on seven new apps as well as updating our existing apps.

MindSea was proud to help organize and sponsor the Halifax event, and I am happy to report that we had over 25 people show up to donate their skills. Our push this year was to get more marketers and designers and I think we handily met that goal. Each team had a couple of designers and marketers which was really nice to see and made a big difference in our productivity. This extra horse-power allowed the Halifax team to take on four apps!

• Sushi Hiro – in support of Stepping Stone is a Sushi making game for the iPad
• Artists 4 Good – in support of Clean Nova Scotia is an iPad wallpaper app that show cases local artists
• Swipey-Tappy – in support of Leave Out Violence – a game that works similar to the simon says genre of games but using gestures and taps
• Stick Person Theatre – in support of Joints In Motion – an application that allows you to create stick person animations in interesting situations like walking on the moon

Saskatoon had a great turnout as well and they are building some great apps. Here is how Dale Zak described the apps in his post about the weekend.

WeDJ, a social DJ’ing app with a twist that will benefit Choc’laCure who help raise funds for the Saskatoon Cancer Centre, CoachPad a handy sports team sketchpad that supports North East Outreach a small non-profit charitable organization in Melfort, Saskatchewan that provides 24 hour crisis hotline and finally ShouldI, a social decision maker that will benefit Saskatoon Friendship Inn who provide breakfast and lunch for over 500 people daily.

Well, now we head in to the most important stage: finishing the apps, getting the word out and getting the proceeds into the hands of the charities. We have an extremely dedicated group of volunteers that have committed to getting these apps done, so stay tuned over the next little while and you will see some shiny new apps in the App Store.

I would like to thank Dale Zak for coming up with this crazy idea and keeping everyone motivated; his energy level and commitment to social change is unwavering.

The iHackathon in the news

For more information about Apps 4 Good and our mission check out the website at www.Apps4Good.ca

Check out the iHackathon segment in episode 214 of CommandN.tv, around the 5:00 minute mark.

Michelle Doucette took some fantastic photos for us this year.

We had some nice coverage on CBC both east and west:

• Developing iPhone Apps for Charity
• Sask. Developer builds apps for charity

Search or browse all Tradewinds Realty properties throughout beautiful Nova Scotia.

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App Store

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• Look up any stop and get a list of all busses and arrival times
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App Store

Preorder sales for the iPad are estimated at 50,000 units in the first two hours in the US alone. We think this is great news! The iPad looks as if it is going to be both fun to use and interesting to work with from a development perspective. We anticipate more opportunities to grow in the app market with lots of potential for great apps that take advantage of the new possibilities the iPad presents.

Since it was launched about a month ago, Transit to Go has used a modified version of the hbus.ca trip planning site for its underlying data model. hbus.ca was launched in March 2009 to some small amount of fanfare, being the first usable trip planner for the HRM covering a substantial portion of its routes. It was produced without the cooperation of the city, using information scraped from the pdf schedules and information gathered by hand using a bike and a GPS. It wasn’t complete by any means (only really covering downtown Halifax and some parts of Dartmouth and Clayton Park), but it was a good start and showed the potential of the technology. Still, a “good effort” is a small consolation to someone not living in an area which was covered by hbus. The main thing missing for this to work well was data, but time to gather it was limited and it seemed impossible to get any cooperation from the city (or Halifax Metro Transit) on that. Citing concerns about how it would be used, detailed transit information for the HRM was kept proprietary, out of reach of independant developers.

Transit to Go, released earlier this year, provides another compelling example of the utility of open data. Trip planning as provided by services like hbus or Google Transit is great, but there are often far more options than can reasonably presented in such a system. For example, there are at least 20 buses which can take you from downtown Halifax to the north end. Frequent users of such systems eventually come to use them less to plan trips than to see what transit vehicles might be coming in the relatively near future. Why not just collapse such information into an easy to use view? As a bonus, the user would no longer have to manually enter their starting and ending points. Just press the GPS button! Talk about making transit easy and accessible! Unfortunately, since it was using the same data as hbus, Transit to Go suffered from the same problem: lack of coverage of areas outside downtown Halifax. That is, until now.

Thanks to the fortuitous series of events (mostly being put in touch with the right people) and the cooperation of HRM’s web department, we recently got a hold of the official GTFS feed from the city. It’s a small irony that this basically consisted of imparting one piece of information: the URL of the Google Transit Feed on HRM’s servers. All sorts of finangling for one small piece of information! But who cares about that now? What matters is the end result. After some minor clean up of the provided data (to fit the stop information for the iPhone’s limited display size), we were ready to go. A new release which was vastly more useful than before. We hope you love it.

What’s next? Well, obviously a new version of hbus.ca is warranted, and we at Mindsea are working hard at making that happen. The new data did reveal some problems in our trip planner which we’re working hard to fix. Expect some news on this in the coming weeks.

Looking further ahead, our understanding is that the city staff are pushing to move towards a complete open data policy (like that used by the city of Vancouver) which would make this (and other) data available to anyone, without going through the ringamarole of a formal approval process. What does this mean? More useful iPhone apps, more cool visualizations, and, yes, more useful web applicationsI If you think this sounds as cool as we do, please send a note to your councillor saying that you support this move. Let’s unlock the creative potential of Halifax’s developer community!

Check it out: Wish You Were Here app built for Apps4Good

Previously links to apps would automatically take you the the app’s description in iTunes, but if you don’t have iTunes no such luck, unless you want to install it. So this is good news. Although we believe in giving an iPhone app it’s own unique place on the Web, e.g. TransitToGo.com, now you can at least share your app with the rest of the world if you don’t.