Here’s another to add to the list of chores that “there’s an app for”: finding a carparking space in an unfamilar town.
Nosey Parker is an iPhone app for UK drivers that find the nearest, cheapest or safest car park.
Pulling in data from 13,400 car parks providing a claimed total of 1.8 million car spaces, this app certainly should find you somewhere to park without resorting to aimlessly driving around for what seems like hours (something most people will have been subjected to at some point).
Aside from the car parks themselves, Nosey Parker’s database also contains information on car parks with parent and toddler spaces, disabled spaces and even car parks that accept credit cards. An update will be realised within the next few weeks and will include the addition of search and the option to filter results by a number of different criteria.
One thing we’d like to see in a future release of the app would be great to see live data of available parking spaces. Although this wouldn’t be possible for every car park, it would add real value for many of the large automated car parks that have the data readily available.
The app is the first to come from Manchester-based digital agency StarDotStar whose previous projects have included a fantastically named information kiosk for children called ‘Quantum Sheep & The Wonderful Wolds’ and their own Content Management System aimed at “normal people” called StarDotSite.
Nosey Parker is available from the App Store now at an introductory price of 59p, increasing to £1.79 from 1st March. You can find it on iTunes here.
Looks to be a really interesting app. Though the comment about asking for live capacity info. is that car park data really 'readily available'? I wasn't aware that NCP etc published XML feeds of car park available capacity.
I guess you could rig up webcams + OCR in front of boards or something.
“Readily available” in that they have the data and I'm sure they'd want to share it to help customers use their car parks. I'm sure they could offer it if they wanted to.
there aren't that many car parks with live information, but we are looking at introducing those feeds where they're available…
We like the idea of rigging up web cams.. ;-)
I've no doubt that monolithic firms like NCP will see this app as a threat and release their own one, reserving the right to their own data.
Perhaps part of the Manchester Open Data city movement could see the council opening up any data they have themselves though.