One of the great unsung webOS tools is Ares. The Ares visual IDE lets you build and test webOS apps quickly. So quickly in fact, that it can be used to catch cats…
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Civicwebs Hackathon in Portland. This is an all day event where local hackers get together to build code for the benefit of the city. Mostly, these revolve around producing or consuming local government data in interesting ways that will benefit the populace. One of their most intriguing projects is the CatMapper.
The core idea of CatMapper is to have people map sightings of cats throughout the city into a big shared database. It sounds strange but actually has a lot of useful benefits. It will let authorities track how many stray cats are wandering the city, provide education to citizens, and reduce the number of stray cats that have to be euthanized.
One of the problems CatMapper faces is how to do the data collection itself. They started with a paper survey, but it’s difficult to get people to walk around the city filling out paper forms and mailing them in. The solution: build a data collection app that runs on devices everyone already has—their smart phones. That’s where Ares comes in.
Since this is all non-profit work, the project had little time or money for mobile app development. With Ares, another developer and I were able to turn the survey into a mobile app in only a few hours. Thanks to Ares’ visual GUI builder, we could put together some screens, test them, then redesign them a few times until we had something easier and faster to use than the original paper survey. Then it only took a couple of hours to hook the UI into the back end using a JSON web service. (The back end is powered by CloudDB, which is super easy to use from webOS.)
By the end of the day we had a functioning app and live data streaming into the database. Soon we will polish up the UI, add some data validation steps, then put it in the catalog for cat watchers everywhere to use and enjoy.
