New App: Boise’s Most Wanted

So I had one of those late night ideas for an app after seeing this site: Boise Area’s Most Wanted. I thought that would make a great app because who’s going to sit there and remember all those faces and names. However, if it’s on your mobile device, you can quickly look up that seemingly familiar face you see walking around the Boise area. Of course, this wouldn’t be so that one can play vigilante, but instead be a way for common citizens to be more aware while they’re out and about and call the police if they see one of these characters.

Anyway, since I figured it wouldn’t be too hard, I took about two hours while I was in a chat-based meeting with a few of my developers, and threw together this app that scrapes the HTML for the website and compiles it into a native iPhone app:

It’s all dynamic and pretty cool, although not very pretty. But what do you want from 2 hours of work?

I’ll probably release this on the app store after a bit more polish and maybe a big “Call Crime Stoppers” button that tells your iPhone to dial the hotline to report your sighting.

Other ideas:

• Display bounty information – Some of these suspects have bonds as large as 10s of thousands of dollars!
• Have a separate listing for the Arrested section. Because don’t you feel all warm in fuzzy when you see direct results of the police force’s hard work?
• Aggregate the daily incident reports for easy reading on your phone.

What are some other ideas to add to this app?

Would you think this app would be useful to the general population of Boise and surrounding areas?

Do officers even have iPhones?

This was just one of those ideas that seemed like a good idea at the time, but I need honest feedback if I should continue development on it. So, let me know what you all think in the comments below!