U.S. State Department Travel Stats iPhone App

In my last post, I discussed an open source iOS SDK that I had developed to access the newly released Select State.gov Data API. In that post, I had mentioned that I was working on an iPhone app that demonstrated how to integrate the SDK. The app is now published on the Apple App Store:

U.S. State Department Travel Stats

The iPhone app provides an overview of Secretary Kerry’s official travel including a set of travel statistics, a list of recent trips, events, videos, and other information published on State.gov. While my main goal was to develop a simple app that demonstrated how to integrate the SDK, I also wanted to build an app that would be useful and interesting for users.

During the design process, I identified two types of users:

General Public:
I wanted to include easy-to-understand travel statistics to give citizens an idea of how much this particular Secretary of State is traveling. I also included a list of recent trips that allows users to drill into specific trip stops and events within each location. Each event has background information and details associated with it. Videos of public comments made by the Secretary are also included when available.

State Department Staff:
I have the pleasure of working with a group of Foreign Service Officers at the Department of State that travel extensively in support of the Secretary. These officers are the behind the scenes heroes that meticulously plan and organize each of the Secretary’s trips. Each one of them has flown thousands of miles with Secretary Kerry and I wanted to provide a fun way to give them a sense of how far they’ve traveled. To give users a sense of the scale, I included a view that depicts how far the Secretary has traveled in relation to landmarks like the circumference of the Earth, the distance to the Moon, and a typical transcontinental flight from D.C. to London. To date, Secretary Kerry has traveled the equivalent of 14.9 times around the equator of the Earth!

I’ve received very positive feedback on the app so far. It was a fun project to work on and I hope that I’ll get the chance to work on more projects like this one.

You can download the full source code for the app from github: https://github.com/AcuityInfoMgt/DOSDataAPIExampleApp