Followers

Monday, January 25, 2010

PotholeSnitch


Greetings! I'm the creator and developer of the PotholeSnitch iPhone Application, which I fondly call "The Snitch" for short. This blog's purpose is to help you find your way around the Snitch, and to permit you to comment on its usefulness, request improvements, report issues, and assist fellow users.
History of the Snitch
One morning during the brutal winter of 2006, I drove to my day job for a well-known telecommunications carrier in central New Jersey after a major snowstorm. I found my car bouncing around a highway that was in deep disrepair. I had a tool at my hand - a cell phone. I could make a call to the authorities to complain, but what would I tell the NJ State Police, anyway? There's a pothole somewhere between exit 32 and exit 33, roughly near milepost 47.3? It sure didn't seem to be very helpful.  
I realized that my cell phone had embedded GPS capabilities, but there was no way to expose and capture that information. I was driving, after all, so even if the phone reported my coordinates to me, I'd need pencil and paper to record them, not exactly something safe to do on the road.  What if I could just simply press a button whenever I hit a pothole and its location would be recorded? Then I could deliver the coordinates of several issues in one fell swoop via a single email message to my town's transportation department.
Enter the iPhone in 2007. Finally, a device existed that could not only determine its GPS coordinates, but could make them available to me. Next step, write a program to display the precise location of an issue graphically - a map would be nice! -  and make it simple to report to a third party.
And so the Snitch was born. After four months of prototyping, development, and testing, I placed the Snitch for sale in the iTunes App Store in November, 2009.
Thanks
Thank you for purchasing PotholeSnitch. I hope you find it useful and that you have as much fun using the Snitch as I had developing it.
-- Elli Barasch

1 comment:

  1. Would be nice if we could have the chance to include a photo of the problem.

    ReplyDelete