February 26, 2015

ParkenDD

A few months ago Code for Germany launched. An OK Lab (Open Knowledge Lab) was founded in Dresden soon after, although similar projects (offenesdresden.de) were already in place. Everything merged and Dresden has had quite an active community interested in bringing Open Data to the next level. It’s awesome.

My first real contribution to this comes in form of an iPhone app using a PHP scraper backend scraping the data at dresden.de/freie-parplaetze. An Android application for this purpose came to life fairly quickly (find it here), so a clone for iOS just had to follow!

It shows you whether a public parking lot is closed or not, how many spots are available and where it is on a map. It’s currently waiting for review and will hopefully be on the App Store within a few days. Definitely fun to build and I learned quite a bit more about developing for iOS. Future projects will be even better and more fun to build ;)

The source for this application is available on Github. See https://github.com/kiliankoe/parkendd.

Update: Apple has just approved the first version of the app. It’s available here: https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/parkendd/id957165041