Hoofit is an Android app that tells you how walkable your current location is.  It lists your Walk Score and Transit Score (from https://www.redfin.com/how-walk-score-works) as well as the average rent for a two bedroom apartment in your current neighborhood (from rentometer.com).  I created Hoofit over about 40 hours during December 2011 and January 2012, re-using some code from the now-defunct Real Estate Droid app I previously created.

“Great resource during my apartment hunt!”

Peter

Project Highlights

I again placed a heavy focus on a polished, professional look no matter when screen size or device it runs on.

Hoofit makes use of the Android SDK’s LocationManager and LocationListener classes to keep track of the user’s current location.  It starts off reading location from Cell or Wifi networks to get a “coarse” location, and then switches to GPS for a “fine” location when it becomes available.  I was also careful to track location only when the app is active to prevent draining a device’s battery.

The app consumes XML data from Walk Score and Rentometer RESTful web services.

Results

Hoofit? was an experiment in turning out a simple, quality app and seeing what kind of exposure I could get.  Hoofit? was well-rated, but never got any significant traction, and never covered the modest cost of the data from Walkscore.   Today’s environment is a lot different than when I first started working on Android, when even unpolished toy apps could expect a fair number of downloads.  I unpublished Hoofit? in December 2012 so that I could unsubscribe from Walkscore’s premium data feed.

Adam Parkes did the graphic design for Hoofit, and we collaborated on the UI flow and layout.