Announcing the alpha release of mancunia.mobi

mancunia.mobi - it’s Manchester on your mobile phone.

It’s a project I’ve been working on for a few months, ever since I found out I’d be moving to Manchester. It’s based on the Molly Project, which is the open source framework that powers Mobile Oxford, the site I worked on in my last job. It’s still very much in an alpha phase – the UI is still “stock” Molly and it’s a bit thin on the feature ground, but I wanted to get it out there to get interest in the project.

So what can it do right now?

Bus and tram timetables for all of Manchester

What do I want it to do? Much, much more – open library search, better event listings, rail departure info, real-time tram info, etc… But to get all this, I need help:

• Better hosting (this is currently on a spare box – and it can’t stay there for long, but it’s memory hungry, so living on shared hosting isn’t right for it)


• Designers! I made the logo, and it shows. I want to get people with a creative flair to give their input, and even better if they love HTML5, because the wider Molly Project is building a HTML5 frontend, so there’s plenty of opportunity to get involved


• Developers! There’s lots of work undergoing with the Molly 2.0 redesign, so if you love coding, and have some spare time to help improve an open-source project, then we’d love for you to get involved – Molly’s a fairly easy codebase to get to grips with.

This is just a soft launch, for me the killer app will be real time tram info, but in the mean time – it’s here, and it’s ready to go, for timetabled bus info. I invite feedback!