Local Events Demo

Local Events Demo is a mobile phone app (for Android) that presents a simple events list for a user chosen community. The emphasis is on "simple" in the sense that instead of the user having to go into a browser and then a bookmarked web site, the app extracts the relevant info and only shows the event list. The app remembers the user's chosen site and shows the latest version each time it is started up.   Obviously there can be many types of interactions between a community and its members. A calendar of events is one of these. Users typically want this information on the spur of the moment, not in a newspaper that is long gone or on a web site that they can't easily access when away from their computer (if they even have a computer).  Many cities publish such calendars on the web, but they are mostly clunky to access on a mobile phone. Since many people, even those not otherwise much into computers, may have access to a smart phone (and even more so in the future), a simple app that can access the events calendar for a community can be very useful if sufficiently handy.   For this app to work for a given community, the community must maintain their event schedule on their web site in a standard markup format. This is a desirable situation regardless of this specific app, in the sense that if communities throughout the U.S. would publish in a common markup format, it would encourage other app developers to develop such apps as well, thus forcing app improvement via competition. Each community member can then choose the app that they like best, while still being able to see the same data as their neighbor who might be using a different app. In that spirit, this app is truly more of a demonstration/proof of concept than a fully fleshed out app with all the bells and whistles that one might eventually desire.   Currently some communities use a standard markup format called "hCalendar". Thus this app uses that format and offers event lists for a few such communities.  You will note that one of the communities listed is even in New Zealand.  I included it to emphasize the point of how far reaching this concept can be.   Over time, app improvements can be made using all the evolving power of smart-phones, offering such things as text-to-speech for the sight handicapped, different languages, etc. In other words, as smart-phones develop more and more capabilities to help the handicapped, the apps can be updated to use the same, continually extending the reach of this info to the handicapped. It is my hope that the simplicity of this app concept would lend itself to such capabilities without overwhelming the user.   One of the impediments to this solution in its full blown form is for the app to have a way to "discover" available sites. For purposes of this demo app, I included a list of "sites which use hCalendar markup" on our web site. The app first reads that list in order to know what sites to offer to the user when the Menu > Filter By Event Source ... option is chosen. Obviously the administration of such a list is a big problem unless administration can be distributed in some manner. My thought on this is get states and/or counties to publish such lists for their communities. The user could then be offered a list of states/counties and finally a list of community sites. Using GPS technology, the app could also show the choices based on the state/county of the user's current GPS location.   Regarding the matter of replicability of this app there are two main possibilities. The first is to have a single app that is available everywhere, with a distributed administration capability that is used widely by states/counties (as mentioned above). The second replication option is that this is a fairly simple app that could be easily changed to work for a specific site only or for a specific group of sites and then published as a separate app. This second method might be much more viable in the short term due to the lack of a directory of hCalendar markup community web sites.   It should be mentioned that there are currently some proprietary web sites in the business of providing calendar of events information on the web. They currently have little presence in the mobile apps space. Also, because they are proprietary, there is basically no hope that any of them could eventually work for all communities. They are not restricted to use by communities and therefore  community info might get lost amidst the "for profit" event listings of these proprietary sites. Also, having multiple proprietary sites requires each community to go through the process of signing up and maintaining their info for each site separately. The hCalendar markup approach requires maintenance of only a single web site with events listed in hCalendar markup format and having a directory (maybe at the state or county level) containing the address of that web site. As documented in the readme.txt file within the included zip file, there is information on how to load this app onto an Android device and execute it.  For those not having access to an Android phone, a video that shows the app being executed is also included in the zip file (same as the one on youtube.com).