Liveability

Where you live has a huge impact on your quality of life, but when you're looking to move to a new area it can be difficult to find out important liveability information. How fast is the broadband? Is it an area with rich cultural diversity? How safe is it compared to other suburbs?

Our app helps you decide where you want to live based on your priorities. For example if you want to live among other people your age, Liveability tells you the median age of the people who live in each local area, and the percentile in your state. If living in a low-crime area is your priority, our app tells you about the level of crime in each area, both in terms of instance and relative to other areas. You can search by suburb across Australia, and find your location on a map and look at nearby suburbs. 

Our team includes an ios programmer, a government data analyst (father and daughter) and a graphic designer. We chose to build this app because it makes good use of our skills, and because it's a tool that helps people (including us) use government data to make better decisions. 

Liveability is a universal app that can run on devices including iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. To build the app we mashed together data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Taxation Office, Australian Goverment Department of Communciations, ACT Policing, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and Apple Maps. We sourced this data from data.gov.au, ABS.Stat beta, the organisations' data repositories and a useful ACT crime database created by a 2014 GovHacker. We analysed data using Excel and Numbers, and used python to convert CSV files to sqlite databases. We then embedded these databases in the application for quick retrieval and low memory footprint. We used the FMDB database wrapper to wrap the sqlite databases (thanks Flying Meat). We built the application in Objective C for iOS. Finally, we used Adobe Photoshop CC to design the icons for the app button, home page and for each of the liveability measures.