Aussie Toilets WP7 App

My second app 'Aussie Toilets' has now been published on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. It's an app for locating the nearest public toilet, and it's free!

It uses data provided by the Australian Government's National Toilet Map website. It's a useful app to have on your phone, especially if you're out and about and need to find the nearest 'public conveniences'.

The app displays a map of your current location (or defaults to Australia if it isn't sure, or you've declined permission for the app to access your phone's GPS).

Once you've zoomed in to a particular location, it will begin loading the database. This may take a few seconds, as the database is quite large.

It then displays up to 5 nearest public toilets.

You can pan around the map, and use the standard 'pinch to zoom' to zoom in closer or further out.

Tapping on a name will take you to a new page with more details about that facility. The data is displaying using the 'pivot' control, so you can swipe left or right to pan to each section.

Specific facilities include male/female toilets, baby change and showers. Other facilities will be added in future versions (e.g. accessible toilets etc).

The opening hours are also displayed. Some locations might be open 24 hours, others (eg. in a shopping centre) only during certain times.

These details vary for each facility and are only as accurate as the data supplied to the database by the organisations responsible for each toilet (e.g. Councils, State government agencies, transport providers, shopping centres, service stations and food outlets). The app's database in the initial release is current as of January 2011.

To install Aussie Toilets on your Windows Phone 7 device, go to http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=dcf35aa5-3829-e011-854c-00237de2db9e (Opens in Zune)

Future plans

• Detect and allow database updates to be downloaded as they become available from the government site
• Nice icons for facility details
• Display more of the facility details as included in the database
• Improve performance of database access
• Investigate ways to provide feedback and improve data quality

Footnote

I took quite a while to settle on the name 'Aussie Toilets'. I'd had a few other good suggestions – things like 'Dunny Directions', 'Loo Locator' or 'Aussie Loos'. In the end I decided I'd stick with a nice obvious self-explanatory (if slightly more pedestrian) name.