YEG Open Data, the 2010 Edmonton Municipal Election, and Android

(Or, things to do when you have a sick kid)

One of the new data catalogues that the City of Edmonton has put up is the 2010 Election Results.  This Thanksgiving Long Weekend I was kind of “grounded” at home when my son came down with a nasty inner ear infection.  I was hanging out with him, and thought I could use the time to see how hard it would be and how quickly I could put together an Android application that would poll these results and show leading candidate in each contest for a given ward.  Turns out it was not that hard at all.  Development time was less than one day, and then I had the application running on my phone for a couple of days.

If you search the Android market place for YEG Vote, and you’re running Android 1.6 or higher you should able to find the application and install it (assuming, of course, you care about the election results).  The application itself is pretty bare bones.  It will get the results every five minutes, and then show the leading candidate.

I think my next trick will be to duplicate the application in C# and MonoDroid just to get a feel for the differences and such.  I’d wager that it will take even less time in MonoDroid for me, given that I’m much more fluent in C# than I am in Java.  I’d have done this in MonoDroid to being with, but MonoDroid is currently in a limited preview and one of the conditions of being in the preview program is that you can’t distribute applications written in MonoDroid yet. I would have tried a Windows Phone 7 port, but it just doesn’t make much sense, given that the number of people in Alberta with actually WP7 devices is probably less than 10.  Maybe next election.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to let me know. If I can scrounge up some time this weekend before the election I’ll see if I can implement them.

And, it goes without saying, regardless of what you think about this application, if you live in Alberta, make sure you get out and vote this Monday (October 18th, 2010).