Humanitarian Kiosk provides a range of up-to-the-minute humanitarian related information from emergencies around the world.
UNOCHA, December 2012
One of the interesting requirements for the project was that UNOCHA did not want to have to maintain another server, so instead we used Dropbox as the backend.
Each UNOCHA country office was given access to their own Dropbox folder where they would drop documents, PDFs, images, videos and maps. The app allowed users to subscribe to each of those country folders like Sudan, Pakistan, etc making the content available offline.
This proved incredibly valuable for humanitarian workers that could synchronize their kiosks before getting on a plane, and read all those important infographics while being offline in the air.
I developed the first version of Humanitarian Kiosk as a native iOS app, which at the time was the first app that UNOCHA had released on the App Store. I later rebuilt the second version in Ionic, to utilize the same code base for both the iOS and Android apps. Both versions of the app offered some rich functionality for the different data types, KML file were rendered as layers on Google Maps, videos was playable offline inside the app, images were saveable to your Camera Roll, and PDFs importable to iBooks. In the first version, a lot of that functionality wasn't even available on iOS, so was quite a technical achievement at the time.
I can easily say that Humanitarian Kiosk was one of the most enjoyable projects I've ever worked on :)
Dale helped keep us laser focused on the core problem at hand while delivering a cutting-edge solution that was simple-to-use and required little maintenance. The experience was a refreshing change and produced results that I wished all digital projects could.
