Posted by
daver in
City Living on
October 2, 2012 |
no responses With a national newspaper claiming that the sales from the latest version of the iPhone will turn the US economy around, it’s hard to ignore the power of those ubiquitous cell phones. They’re everywhere, and they go wherever we go — it makes me wonder how the human race got this far without them.
We want to do our part and make sure that Kent is part of the cellular evolution so we’re pleased to announce that you can now carry your City around in your pocket with a City of Kent mobile phone app.
Just visit your app store and search for City of Kent Ohio and the FREE app should pop up, ready to be downloaded at your convenience.
The app is built around our observations for the kinds of things that you would to connect to your City on. From simple stuff like important City phone numbers to more complicated service requests to fix a pothole or broken curb.
One of my favorite elements is the text notification system that you can sign up for. The idea would be that when we have some pressing community news alert we can send out a mass text message to anyone that subscribes to the service. We plan to keep the usage of that to emergency only — at least for awhile until we see how well it is received.
We made some assumptions about what people would want on the app (because we had to start somewhere) but we don’t claim to be app design experts so consider this app still a work in progress and if there’s something that you think needs to be added, let us know and we’ll see if we can accomodate your request.
I should also note that for cost reasons we’re using a basic city type of template so while we have some customization that we can add, we are still limited by the parameters established by the off the shelf software that we purchased to build our app. We’re also self taught so we’re still learning as we go along and I suspect that we’ll slowly figure out the bells and whistles that are embedded in the software over time — so please be patient with us.
As a City we blog, we tweet, we facebook, (we’re working on Pinterest), and now we’re mobile. So keep up with Kent and download your app today.
(as of October 1 we have had 133 downloads of the app!)
