Gavin Schulz

New Skate Hamilton Mobile UI

Since Skate Hamilton launched in late December I've been working hard to continue to improve it and make it more useful to Hamiltonians.  To that aim I'm happy to announce some improvements that have been launched for Skate Hamilton.

 

List View

On devices with smaller screens or less powerful processors using the map to find rinks can be difficult and time-consuming.  So to fix that I've added a list view that shows you rinks nearby your chosen location as a list rather than as pins on a map.  It also features infinite scrolling which is automatically triggered by scrolling to the end of the list.

 

Rink Details

The first version of Skate Hamilton did not have a great screen for showing more details about a particular rink.  In this new version I've entirely redesigned the rink details screen to show more information and do so in a way that is more user friendly and accessible.  You can now see the rink's phone number and access directions with one click.

 

Better Performance

The entire mapping interface has been rewritten to improve performance and to minimize the amount of data that needs to be loaded at any one time.  This has made browsing the map interface much more pleasant and much snappier.

 

Expanded Mobile Support

Skate Hamilton now also supports Blackberry devices with BBOS 6.0 and greater.  There is still work being done on support for Windows Phone 7 and hopefully we'll have support for it soon.

 

While we haven't had the oppurtunity to do any outdoor skating this year due to the weather, if nothing else Skate Hamilton will be in fine form for next winter.  Check out the new updates at http://skatehamilton.com

Skate Hamilton is live!

As the temperature starts to dip below freezing and we start to see some snow many people also start thinking about where to play hockey and go skating in and around the city.  We at OpenHamilton decided to help Hamilton area citizens with this problem this year by building a better experence to discover rinks than the city currently offers by building SkateHamilton.  We've been working hard on this for about a month and recently demoed it at DemoCamp Hamilton and got great feedback.  In total we 53 rinks listed at this moment including all the city owned/operated indoor and outdoor rinks.  Each rink also has a listing of any public activities that take place at the rink.

 

We have also built a mobile optimized version of this site to provides a better experience to you when you are looking for rinks on the go.  We are working hard on finishing the last few parts of Skate Hamilton including an embeddable version to put on your website.  We are also planning on adding some social features so that you can let others know when you are planning to go skating or to help you organize a game of pick-up hockey.  We welcome any feedback either via Twitter, @OpenHamilton, or via our email list.

 

Once again this application shows what developers and citizens can do when we're empowered with municipal data.  Unfortunately, the City of Hamilton is not providing us with much open data and all the rink data in Skate Hamilton was collected manually.  We urge citizens to contact their councillors and the mayor to let them know how important open data is to them and how it can help developers build useful apps for all citizens.

 

Developers

Skate Hamilton also has a rudimentary API that you can use to get access to the data inside our database.  You can see all the API information at http://skatehamilton.herokuapp.com/api  If you have any feature requests or further thoughts on how we should expand our api you can drop us a line on our Google Group.