Smartphone ‘Apps’ for Local Authorities

kentucky.inetgiant.com

Most councils are now developing or looking to develop smartphone ‘apps’ to complement some of their web information and services. But what is the best way to go about it? This issue, we ask Lichfield District council webmaster and techie blogger Stuart Harrison – pictured above (  http://www.pezholio.co.uk ) – for the secrets behind his council’s successful first steps into this brave new world.

E-Government Bulletin: Lichfield has developed an iPhone app called ‘ratemyplace’ to find local restaurants and see their hygiene ratings. How did it come about?

Stuart Harrision: “We built Ratemyplace a few years ago as a website ( http://www.ratemyplace.org.uk ), and because of the nature of the data – restaurant food safety inspections – I thought it would be an ideal fit for an iPhone application. People can find restaurants close to them and see how clean their kitchens are.

“I used a toolkit call Titanium Appcelerator ( http://www.appcelerator.com ), which allows you to build apps using HTML and Javascript, so it was pretty quick to develop without having to learn Objective C (the programming language that iPhone apps are developed in), and all the data is fetched from the Ratemyplace API.

“Overall user numbers are difficult to get, but we get roughly about five downloads a week.”

EGB: What other apps are you working on?

SH: I’m currently working on a tourism app, but this will be a ‘webapp’, which works on iPhone, Android and Blackberry (using jQuery mobile – http://jquerymobile.com ) rather than one built specifically for the iPhone app store.

EGB: How easy is it to make for councils to make an app, and get it into the iPhone app store?

SH: If you’re using a toolkit such as Titanium Appcelerator, very easy. All you need to know is HTML and Javascript. We have to pay 99 US Dollars per year to be a registered developer, but that’s the only real cost involved, apart from time.

To get them onto the iPhone store, the actual upload process is the most fiddly part! Lots of creating certificates and uploading them to Apple, but the review process (which I’d heard was labyrinthine) was pretty quick, and the app was on the app store within five days.

EGB: Should people concentrate on the iPhone, or try to develop for other smartphones too?

SH: Titanium Appcelerator allows you to build your app for Android phones with very little work, but as I don’t have an Android phone to test with I haven’t built the Ratemyplace app for Android yet. This is part of the reason I’m moving across to webapps, which work on all smartphones.

EGB: What are the potential benefits of smartphone apps for local authorities?

SH: GPS (satellite location) really helps, people can report problems when they’re out and about quickly and easily. The team dealing with the call will also know the exact location of the problem, so they can deal with it quickly and efficiently.

GPS also helps people to see what’s going on where they are, be it food safety ratings, planning applications, or even local events.

EGB: How important a part of the mix are apps going to become for online local services?

SH: There are already predictions that mobile internet usage is going to outstrip desktop in the next few years, so optimising your web offerings for mobile is going to become increasingly important.

You can also make your websites location-aware pretty easily these days, and this is going to expand to being able to upload pictures and video soon, so I can see a lot of apps moving away from the app store environment to web applications, which are easier to develop and more open. We’re a long way off from being able to make something like Angry Birds as a web app however [Editor’s note: the addictive game ‘Angry Birds’ is an app phenomenon – see  http://www.rovio.com ].

EGB: What are the best apps out there that you have seen made by other councils?

SH: Warwickshire have built a good one, giving you information on nearby council facilities, as well as news, jobs and events (see http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/iphone). Kirklees and Birmingham have also developed a new app which allows you to report problems to the council ( http://bit.ly/h0L9X0 ).

EGB: And finally, what are the secrets of a good/compelling app?

SH: It needs to be simple to use, and quick. People’s attention spans are much shorter when they’re using mobile devices, so give them the most important information first, and then give them the opportunity to drill down. If you’re building an iPhone app, don’t get too creative, stick to the native design. It’s what people are used to, plus Apple spend millions a year on usability research – you probably won’t be able to improve on that!



(E-Government Bulletin #327| Dan Jellinek)