Adding a new incident to TrafficMATE

TrafficMATE taps into data provided by state government transport and main roads departments to display the latest traffic incidents impacting your commutes. There are time however when the most up-to-date information come from people already on the road. With this in mind, TrafficMATE allows its users to post incidents that will be instantly available to all other users.
How to add a new incident.

• Tap the “add a new incident” link on the actions panel of TrafficMATE.
• There are a number of ways to choose the location of the incident.
• Tap the ‘me’ button on the application bar and TrafficMATE will attempt to find you current location.

• Tap the ‘search’ button and type a street, suburb to find using the Bing Maps API.

• Tap-and-hold on the map to select a location for the incident.

• Once you have selected the location, tap the ‘next’ button on the application bar to view the incident details page.

• Select the type of incident from the pick-list and enter a description (this is optional).
• The address and suburb will get automatically populated from the location you selected on the map.
• Tap the ‘save’ button and your incident will get lodged on the TrafficMATE server.

Who will see the incident?
Any users, including yourself, will be able to see that incident in their 'nearby' list (if it is within 5km of their current location) or if it occurs within 1km of one of their save routes.
How long will the incident stay open?
Incidents lodged by our users remain current for 2-hours after they are posted. This means that you don’t have to worry about checking if the accident or congestion is clear, or bother updating the incident. The incident will simply be no longer be visible to any TrafficMATE users’ 2-hours after it is posted.
Will I receive Toast Notifications about user-lodge incidents?
No, we only send toast notifications when incidents are lodged from one of our official, government sources. The number of incidents shown on the TrafficMATE application tile will include all incidents, including those lodged by other users that impact your saved routes.

TrafficMATE comes to Victoria

We are happy to announce that TrafficMATE now provides live traffic reports for Victoria. After a lot of work, with special thanks to the team behind HtmlAgility, Windows Phone 7 users now have access to live traffic accident and breakdown reports, sourced directly from the Victorian Government. Incidents are reported across Melbourne and regional Victoria, so matter where you are travelling around the state, you will always have the latest information at your fingertips.

The addition of Victoria to our existing live traffic incident information available for Queensland and New South Wales means that TrafficMATE now covers most of Eastern Australia.

Links to live camera feeds for Melbourne will also be available in the new Mango release of TrafficMATE due out soon. There’s never been a better time to try TrafficMATE on you Windows Phone 7.

TechAu Interview

Cameron and James were interviewed by Jason Cartwright from techau.tv and discussed the motivation behind TrafficMATE.

TrafficMATE presents at Microsoft Tech.Ed

The team at TrafficMATE had the chance to present before a crowded room of Tech.Ed delegates, as a finalist in the Spotlight 2011 Windows Phone Application Competition.

Delegates had a chance to try TrafficMATE on one of the demo Windows Phone 7 devices available throughout Tech.Ed and many attended the Wednesday evening finals presentation. Along with the other finalists, we were had 15-minutes to pitch our app. Congratulations to all the finalist in this tough, Australia-wide competition.

TrafficMATE Promo Animation

If you ever wanted to know why to TrafficMATE then this animation by Shaun Buzza certainly sums it up.

Live Tile Updates for TrafficMATE

After quite a bit of discussion and coding, we are proud to announce that TrafficMATE now supports updates to the Windows Phone 7 Tile.

The discussion mainly centred around what number we should display on the tile. In the end, after testing the app during our real-world commutes, it was decided that we would show the total number of incidents that currently effect any of your saved routes. This works nicely, because recent changes mean that the 'my routes' section of TrafficMATE now shows the total incident count for each of your routes.

We have modified our government RSS feed code to include updating tiles for all users who have opted to receive notifications. We currently update the tile every 10-minutes and will modify this depending on user feedback.

The great part about Tile updates is that you can now see if there are any incidents you need to know about without opening the app. This really fits in nicely with our goal of making TrafficMATE a quick and easy solution to help you avoid traffic congestion.

New Icons for Traffic Incidents

With all the data processing we have been doing to ensure that you get the latest, most accurate traffic information in your area, we recently realised that it was all starting to look a little bland. After all, most of the feeds we process to show traffic incidents have some very common words that describe the type of incident, such as accident, breakdown, congestion, roadworks and flooding. There are also the not so common traffic issues, such as livestock-on-road, debris, car-on-fire and a host of others.

We did quite a but of work attempting to better represent many of these incident types graphically, so that one glance at the 'nearby' section on the TrafficMATE Hub would show exactly what you could expect out on the roads.