Our Work: Mobile Park Application

APF Mobile Park App

The Anchorage Park Foundation’s mobile Park Report Card allowed volunteers to file reports on the condition of local parks. After the reporting period ended, the Park Foundation asked Resource Data to transform the app into one that encourages everyone to use the local parks.

The Solution

We built the Anchorage Parks iOS app, which enables you to

  • Find addresses of and directions to any Anchorage park
  • Find the parks closest to you and how to get there
  • Stamp parks on your Parks Passport as you visit them
  • Send pictures to the Anchorage Park Foundation
  • View park information pages
  • Donate to the Anchorage Park Foundation

The park directory lists all the Anchorage parks, either by name or by proximity to your current location. In addition, you can play the Park Passport game, stamping your Park Passport when you’re inside a park’s boundaries.

From the app, you can also send photos to the Anchorage Park Foundation—such as pictures of people using the parks or pictures of unsafe or damaged equipment so it can be fixed.

Our Approach

Because many parks lack network coverage, we built the app to store information locally when needed and then send it when the device is connected again. For example, the app stores Park Passport stamps in a local, SQLite database. When the user connects to a network, the data is sent to the Park Foundation’s database.

To identify when a user is within a park’s boundaries, we use an algorithm to intersect the device’s GPS location with the Google KML files that define the park’s boundaries.