Story behind ‘ATM Finder’ v2.0

After a while I’m pleased to announce that “ATM Finder” application has been finally pushed out and published on Windows Phone Store.

This has been incredible learning and exploring period to get things done and up and working. So I think this is good time to share some story behind the scene of “ATM Finder v2.0”.

User interface hasn’t been changed so much. Some small enhancements and polishing.

ATM Finder 1.*	ATM Finder 2.0

So what are the new cool features for the new version? Here goes the list:

1. As more settings switches were coming, I decided to split up “Settings” page into multiple pages grouped in single pivot.

2. Now you can turn on to show map immediately after application start. This mode is usually used when you need to navigate directly to nearest ATM and want to look where it is exactly on the map.

3. Now you can see GPS coordinates on main screen. Some feedback received on this – this could sometimes pretty useful because there is rarely any application that is exposing GPS coordinates to the user.

4. For those guys who are traveling and roaming is generating some expenses – offline (local data stored driven) mode is also still available. Local storage will be a bit out-dated. I’m considering to offer offline-download mode – which would provide a way to download data to local storage for particular area when on WiFi.

5. Now you can select multiple “My home bank”. The feature request was pretty obvious as nowadays in modern world we are having more than one bank and credit card.

6. If there unfortunately some misleading data or location for the ATM is invalid then user has possibility to report this issue to the author and data will be fixed.

And of course feature still remains unchanged – you can still get directions to ATM of your choice using Bing Maps directions services.

A bit longer story goes for the backend.

In previous version “ATM Finder” was driven by local data storage. All the ATMs were stored in local storage, loaded up asynchronously and “some-how in parallel” (are you kidding – that’s a single core phone!, for this I’ll share more details in upcoming posts). The change is that data now in v2.0 is retrieve from Windows Azure cloud service. This change was driven by idea that uploading new ATMs or removing some obsolete ones should not trigger client application update. Now any changes made to the list of the ATMs are done on server side and immediately distributed to the clients on-demand. Data also is cached on the server side not to hit SQL server and generate additional costs. For this in more details – another post is pending.

So in honor to ATM Finder application I though that it’s a good time to share some more details on each of the aspect which I faced during design and development phases in following series of blog posts:

1. Overall design and planning phase (planning).
2. Source code and project layout and source control system (planning).
3. Screen layout and application navigation schema (planning).
4. Binding and Model-View-View/Model approach (planning).
5. Reactive Extensions and asynchronous programming on that small device (planning).
6. Location services (planning).
7. Working with Bing Maps (planning).
8. Application state, settings and isolated storage (planning).
9. Consuming Windows Azure cloud services (planning).
10. Performance and asynchronous operation model.
11. Unit testing and UI testing (planning).
12. Packaging, marketplace certification and publishing (planning).

Also I wanted to give a big thanks to my beta testers for invaluable feedback on early versions of ATM Finder app. Thanks goes to (alphabetical order)

1. Āriņš Ivars (@PiRXlv)

2. Bicāns Jānis (@janisbic)

3. Linkēvičš Gusts (@gstgusts)

4. Maciņš Aigars (@Owandir)

5. Andres Sirel (@asirel)

Cheers! Hope this helps. Take a look at http://bit.ly/atmfinder and waiting always for feedback how cash finding process could be improved and enhanced :)