iRail Blog

#iSoc12 Gentse feesten app: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature

Dear reader of this fabulous blog, i’m Michael and this week I worked hard on an app for the Gentse Feesten.

The date is Friday the 6th when Pieter asked me if I could make/finish the prototype of an app made during the hackathon that Tuesday. Knowing the Gentse Feesten started the next Saturday, this would be a rush project. And that’s where it went wrong for a bit.

The app
First of all, let me explain what the app is about. With this app you can search for events during the Gentse Feesten, get more info on them and add them to your timeline planning. With this mobile planning you can always see what you wanted to do that day.

Besides these features, we have the ‘live’ features as well. There’s the ‘live’ mode itself, where you can check during the Gentse Feesten on a map where you are, and what the closest current events are at that moment. Thanks to this you can easily see what’s going on at the other squares without going to them and realizing you were at the best one already.
Another ‘live’ feature is the toilets feature. With this you can see on a map where you are, and where the closest toilets around you are. By clicking on them you can have more info about the toilet. Is it outside, inside, …? You got the answer there!

The release
The Friday after, the 13th of July, we released the app. Thanks to the help of Miet in the last 3 days, the app got finished around 7PM.

With no time for testing left we put the app immediately on the Android store and on the internet for the iOS and Windows Phone users (http://gf12.be).

Once the app was out there in the wilderness, the problems started. Because of the lack of time for testing, there were bugs of course. Twitter became an official bug help center (which is good of course) and also on Facebook and mail people were committing bugs. Since then we worked really hard to get all bugs fixed for the online version, which is hopefully done. By Monday there should be an update for the Android app itself.

I’m proud to say that the fixed app now is a really useful thing during the Gentse Feesten. I used it myself already and it helped me a lot!

This week has been a really hectic week, but I’m glad I did this. Not only for me, but for the whole #iSoc12 team.
I learned a lot of things (especially after the release) which are also applicable to the other teams. Especially Christophe from the iRail team gave us a lot of good feedback to work on.

The #GF12 app was a nice test for #iSoc12, and I’m sure going to inform the others about what I learned of this project.

15. July 2012 by Michael Vanderpoorten
Categories: Summer of code | 3 comments