Sunlight's First Android App

Written by: Eric
Date: 10/07/2009 2:58 p.m.

UPDATE: This app has left beta, and is now live on the Android Market. The QRcode below has been updated, and the link to the beta APK removed. Please download this application from the Android Market.

I want to invite all of you with Android phones to try out a public beta of an Android app that I've been working on inside the Labs. It's called "Congress", and it's a pocket Congressional directory. It takes full advantage of the Sunlight Labs API to show you up-to-date info about members of Congress, and to pull in updates from members' Twitter and YouTube accounts.

It's a small app, really. Some other features, in bullet form:

Find members of Congress by using your phone's location, a zipcode, a last name, or a state.
Read the latest news mentions about them, using the Yahoo News API.
Reply to a member of Congress on Twitter from within the app, using your own account.
Create desktop shortcuts to individual members of Congress.

You can install the app by scanning the QRcode to the left (by using the Barcode Scanner app from the Market, for instance). Make sure you have the "Unknown sources" box checked in the Application Settings screen, and you should be able to install it directly. Any updates to the beta prior to the (free) Market release will always be at the same URL.

This is Sunlight's first mobile app, and we want your feedback about what works and what doesn't, ahead of a full Market release. What would be the most helpful is for beta testers to answer any of these questions:

See any bugs? What kind of bugs? Are you calling me a bad programmer?
Anything obviously missing that should be there?
Any cool feature ideas? For example: an option to receive notifications upon new news mentions of a legislator.

There's a feedback option inside the app that will let you email us from your phone, but if you're at a computer and want to file a formal bug report or feature request, we're using Github Issues for issue tracking. And of course, we also would absolutely love contributions to the app itself - the code is open source, so please fork away.

Thanks for your help in making this an awesome app!

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Tags:

android
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Discussion

Nathan Freitas 10/07/2009 3:17 p.m. (permalink)

Installed - working great so far... perhaps I'll roll an NYSenate.gov version of this.

I'll make sure to report any issues I find.
klondike 10/07/2009 4:34 p.m. (permalink)

Thanks, Nathan! If you need any support adapting it for use for the NY Senate, I'm all hands.
Mark Murphy 10/08/2009 9:12 p.m. (permalink)

@Nathan: Not sure how you were planning on going about this. Rather than creating new clients for different data sets (NY Senate vs. US Congress), couldn't this be implemented via multiple Web service endpoints that a single client queries?
Telly 10/10/2009 9:42 a.m. (permalink)

This is great! Now I can keep Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning in check. Indebted to your graces!
Roger Smith 10/27/2009 8:32 a.m. (permalink)

Thank you very much for sharing this. It will bring more visibility to elected officials. I am not sure of the right forum to introduce this, but I have just released my platform called Govbe http://govbe.com, which allows elected officials and their constituents to connect and people to discuss politics in a hyperlocal forum. I would love any feedback/criticisms. As a side note, Nathan came to speak in one of my mobile classes about Android. Nice job.
Gary 01/13/2010 3:47 p.m. (permalink)

I've tried reading the code and going to the Web site on my phone and the browser says the Web page is not found.
Eric Mill 01/13/2010 4:25 p.m. (permalink)

Gary, this blog post is about the beta version of the app, which has now been removed, since the full version is out on the Android Market.

That blog post, with a QRcode that links to the Market, is here: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/congress-theres-an-android-app-for-that/

What are Your Thoughts?

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