Mobile development has really taken off in the past few years and has become a viable way for college students to make a living, part-time. While I have no plans on programming Android apps post-university, the prospect of doing something I enjoy, being paid for it, and more-or-less working when it's convenient for me is incredible.





However, before I can hope to be paid to bring another person's vision to realization, I should probably spend some time familiarizing myself with the platform. To get started there are two things I'll be doing:





Cal Poly Android Course Labs





I'll be working through a set of labs from a class originally taught at Cal Poly that has been archived at the Google Code University website. This will give me a strong foundation from which I can extend my knowledge and start developing my own applications. I've already completed the first lab and, if things continue the way they are going, I should finish the final one sometime next week.





The Restaurant Locator App





The second milestone will be the development of my own application. The app that I have in mind should be simple enough to implement. How often do you find yourself hungry with a limited amount of time to eat? How much of that time do you waste trying to decide where you should go? My goal is to provide a solution to this problem by arming you with a list of restaurants in your area that can be narrowed down by a number of different criteria, such as cuisine type and whether the restaurant provides WiFi (for those of you who work while you eat), courtesy of Factual, with an emphasis on the restaurants that are closest to your location.





What is Factual?





Factual was founded in 2007 by Gil Elbez, founder of Applied Semantics (acquired in 2003 by Google, now known as Google AdSense), with the goal of developing

an open data platform and community in an effort to maximize data accuracy, transparency, and availability.





Put simply, Factual is a gold mine full of structured data that is waiting to be taken advantage of.





The Factual Restaurants API will be vital to the fruition of this app. During a recent discussion with a Factual Employee I learned that, where there was an emphasis on Places last year, this year will see a lot of improvements to the Restaurant data and API. This API is where all of the information about the restaurants will come from, providing vital details such as location, type of food, hours of operation, take-out availability, health/vegetarian options, etc.





The amount of free, accurate information provided and the ease with which the API can be queried made choosing Factual Data a no-brain-er. The only speed bump at this point, which I expect to be fixed sometime this year, is that the availability of data may be limited in some places.





Mapping and Directions





A smaller, although still important detail will be the ability to request directions from the user's current location to whichever restaurant they choose. Making use of the address/GPS coordinates provided by Factual and the Google Maps API will make this a breeze.





One idea I had was to determine whether traffic was heavy on the route suggested by Google Maps and, if so, recommend an alternative. After all, the goal of this app is to help users get food when you're low on time. Let me know what you think, and any advice you may have, by leaving a comment below.



