Opgenorth.NET

Last night I pushed a new build of YEG Buildings out to the Android Market. The two changes with this one:

• Rather than showing the latitude/longitude of were you are, the application will try to translate that into a more human-friendly address.  Note that the address might not be 100% accurate.  It depends on how much accuracy the GPS has.
• The application no longer uses Google Maps and a KML feed when show where all the historical buildings in Edmonton are.  The map of Edmonton is now rendered locally, and all

Just for fun, I also submitted YEG Buildings as part of the Apps4Edmonton contest.  So, feel free to check out the contest page – there are a lot of neat applications there.  Also feel free to vote mine up. 

If you are using or have used YEG Buildings, feel free to let me know your thoughts.  If you find a bug, let me know.  If you have a feature you’d like to see, I’d love to hear about it.

After a few months of neglect, I put a new version of my Edmonton Historical Buildings application up on the Android Market.  I’ve renamed it to just YEG Buildings, as I’d like to eventually include buildings that aren’t historical, but interesting in general for some reason.  The previous version had a nasty bug that would crash when you tried to view the location of a building on the map.  Was one of those curious things where it worked in the emulator but not on a real device.  I’ve tried it out on my HTC Dream running Cyanogen 6.0 RC3 (this is Android 2.2), and it seemed to work. 

I’ve also added a feature where you could see all the Historical Buildings from the City Of Edmonton’s Data Catalogue at once in Google Maps.  It’s a bit slow (mostly for reasons beyond my control at this point), but it basically works.

You can download it from the Android Market, or via this handy page at AndroidZoom.  You’ll need Android 1.6 or higher.

Just a heads up for those interested:  On Tuesday, June 15th the Edmonton Java User’s Group is having it’s monthly meeting at noon at the Canadian Western Bank Building.  The speaker is none other than yours truly.  I’ll be giving a brief introduction to application development to Android, using my trusty G1 and IntelliJ.

It’s free to attend, so stop by if you’re so inclined.

Not that long ago, the City of Edmonton announced it’s Open Data Catalogue.  I noticed that one of the data catalogues was a list of historical buildings in the city.  Yeah, I know that some people in other cities might consider this a pretty weak list.  I mean, the oldest building in Edmonton isn’t even 150 years old.  I’d wager that some parts of the world consider 150 year old buildings to be “new construction”.  Anyway, as I’ve been dabbling with Android now for about the past year, I thought a handy little project to try out would be to write an app for Android that would show me where the historical buildings are in the city.

I’ve got the foundation of a simple application started over a GitHub called, not surprisingly, Historical Buildings (if you pull the source code, then just a heads up that I use IntelliJ for my Android development).  This application currently works in the emulator, my next step is to installing it on my phone and trying it out for real.  Right now all the application does is present you with a list of buildings.  You click on one, and you’ll see on Google Maps where the building.

Some other ideas for features that may or may not happen:

• Figure out the whole unit testing story in Android.  Then setup a build script.  Then a build server.  CI rocks, but as I’m trying to learn the Android framework and figure out what all the parts are, I’m not to focused on that at the moment.
• Don’t always fetch the data – store it locally
  • I don’t think the way I’m parsing the JSON result is very efficient or “proper”, but it does get the job done.
• Notify the user when they are within a certain distance of a historical building.
• Currently YEG has a PDF explaining the significance of the building.  Not very friendly/convenient for mobile devices.  Need something better.
  • One thought would be to create Wikipedia entries and link to that.
  • Another thought is to petition the City of Edmonton to convert their PDF’s to a more neutral format (HTML anyone)?
  • The Edmonton Public Library has some information about the “Lost Building of Edmonton”.  Maybe incorporate that somehow – perhaps showing what buildings used to exist at a given address?
• Perhaps allow the user to update their coordinates for YEG’s historical buildings.  I’ve notice (on the emulator) that sometimes the lat/long isn’t exactly accurate.  If you look at the image below for the old Arlington Apartments, you notice that the marker should be over the pile of rubble slightly to the left of where it currently is.
• Maybe include buildings that aren’t necessarily designated as historical, but are interesting architecturally or otherwise.
• Instead of using YEG OpenData, perhaps an independent cloud based data store (Azure maybe?)

If you’ve got any other suggestions, I’m happy to hear them.