The meeting was in the central part of Sofia. If you have ever been in the city, perhaps you will know how bad the situation with the traffic is there. During peak hours, the traffic jams are everywhere and you could lose hours until you finally make it to your destination.
So about half an hour before I leave, I searched for some information about the current traffic in the area I was heading to. Luckily, there was such information available online. The data is (almost) real-time and is provided by the company that serves the public transportation system in Sofia.
Then I searched for something I can use on the go on my Android HTC. I couldn't find anything good. There were two apps, but they were far from perfect, crashed and didn't really feel useful. The mobile version of the mobile site was a bit lame and lacking the features I really needed.
Where there is a problem, there is an opportunity.
I fired up Eclipse and in about thirty minutes, the app was in a working state and installed on my handset.
The next evening, the app went live in the Android Market.
Say hello to Sofia Traffic. It does only one thing but does it really well. You can see where are the spots with the heaviest traffic jams, what is the situation near you (using the phone location) and see the big picture on the map.
For me it was an extreme fun to build the application from zero to something that people find really useful. And for me it was an absolute record -- only a few hours of real work and less than 24 hours overall between the moment I hit 'New Project' in Eclipse and the moment I hit 'Publish' in the market.
