AusSnowCam – For the snow bunnies

AusSnowCam – For the snow bunnies

Jun 10

When the season is only a few days away… it becomes pretty damn hard to resist refreshing those webcams on the resort’s website to see how good the snow is looking – but what happens when you browse those sites on your phone…?
The moment you realize most resort websites load horribly on your phone, you’ve found yourself a problem – so I did what any normal nerd would do. I developed an app to fix it. Duh.

2 hours later – AusSnowCam was born (I agree, not the most original name ever, but it works… although the double s’ really do look out of place)

Problem: Resort websites either load okay on your mobile (Mt Buller) or completely suck (Falls Creek/Hotham etc) because they’re not optimized for mobile browsing.

Solution: After some poking around, it seems all the image of the snowcams from the various resort websites always refer to the same url of the image. That one image is just constantly updated on a timely basis from the snow cams.
eg. Mt Buller’s Bourke Street camera will always grab the latest image from here

So I grabbed all these URLs to these images, drew up a spinner, added a webview, coded some logic – and VOILA!

This is also my first app I’ve open sourced – and I’ve started recently learning git. Fun times ahead for sure :)
Here is a link to my GitHub repo for AusSnowCam and also the Android Market link to download it.

As you can see, the snow is looking good and I’m super excited for a rocking season this year!