yycApps - iPhone apps From Calgary Developers.

Calgarians have a wonderful love/hate relationship with parking in the city’s downtown core. We love to bitch and moan about how painful of a task it is and we really, really hate the entire process. Luckily for us we now have Random Type’s yycParking app to hopefully soften the blow of this horrendous task.

Following in the foot steps of Flipp’s Bikeyyc and Medium Rare’s Next Stop, yycParking in the next step in the evolution of custom Calgary-centric apps. Relying on the Calgary Parking Authorities open source data RSS feeds, yycParking allows users to see real time available parking spots at a variety of high traffic downtown lots.

The app scrapes data directly from the Calgary parking authority’s site, which in turn allows yycParking to display the number of available spots, the percentage of the parking lot that is full and even the available number of disabled parking spots. The app also plots the data in a swanky map interface, to allow users to quickly scan the downtown core for the availability of spots, the location of nearest parking lots and even receive directions to the lot directly on your phone. From a user perspective, yycParking is an incredible tool that will make find spots in the core that much easier.

From a design perspective yycParking is a beautifully designed app. The map interface is simple to read and detailed, while the available parking stall interface gives a nice reference to the binary aesthetic of from the parking authorities stalls around the city. The information within the app is beautifully displayed and it’s obvious to see that time and effort was taken in every detail of the app.

And while the app itself is fantastic, let’s not also discount the great achievement of apps such as yycParking in helping to push the open data agenda in Alberta. The yycParking app and the work from the guys at Random Type (and other design outfits in Calgary) only further demonstrates the benefits of releasing useful data to the public. If the information is available publicly, then there’s no telling what the ingenuity of local design outfits is capable of.

So with that, a big congratulations to the team at Random Type is due. Hopefully we’ll see more of these types of apps in the future!