Photo by Bryn Salisbury
At the weekend just gone Elliot and I attended the LinkedGov hackcamp at LBi offices. The event was brilliantly organised by everyone involved.
Some interesting data sets were released . The ones that took mine and Elliot’s interest were the Foreign offices travel advice api and the Greater Manchester bus time tables.
Elliot set to work to make the bus time table data machine readable and expose a RESTful API. As a basically single person task, whilst the foundation was being laid I took a look at the FCO travel advice api, naively thinking that as it was already RESTFul a simple iOS app would not take long!
A few hours later I had managed to integrate with the API and have a parsed data model in for an iPhone and iPad app, a few table views and tab bars to show this data to the user and I had a semi passable application, that could provide some utility.
A photo by Martin Cunningham of Elliot and I hacking in the evening can be found on Flickr.
Not content with a basic application I added some “features” to the application in an attempt to make up for the fact I was working without a designer so the UI was suffering in the pretty stakes. For the rest of the evening I added Google routing for the nearest embassy and an integration with TripIt’s api to show you the FCO’s travel advice and visa entry requirements for countries that you had upcoming trips to.
Some screenshots of the application and a brief overview of the features that were implemented in the 24 hour period can be seen in the slides.
Elliot had been busy whilst I was adding features and managed to get an app on Google app engine that allowed the bus time table data to be uploaded and parsed. Once all this foundation work had been completed and the data exposed as an API it was simple to make a really useful bus application using JQuery mobile so that it would work on any contemporary mobile browser. You can view the application over on app engine http://abusforthat.appspot.com/.
The amount of hacks that were achieved truly showed that exposing this data should allow for some innovative applications as well as the hilarious and just plain fun. Hopefully this will lead to other data sets to be released and APIs exposed by LinkedGov so that people in the UK can take advantage of this data and deliver truly useful applications.
I was lucky enough to win in the ‘commercial sauce’ category, which topped off a great weekend of learning and fun.
Photos from the event on Flickr