I’ve completed a major update to my National Park Service Checklist application, adding the ability to view and record your visit to all of the sites in the National Park Service. This includes the many National Monuments, Historic Parks/Sites, Battlefields, Recreation areas and more… nearly 400 sites!
I’ve also taken the time to introduce a new home screen, leveraging the horizontally scrolling “Panorama” control which are a core design pattern for the Windows Phone. This makes it easy for users to see just those sites of a specific designation (ex: monuments) or region. I show your progress against each of these areas, so you can see how close you are to visiting just the 58 national parks, or visiting every site in the National Capital Region.
As always, this is a free upgrade for existing customers. I have kept the price low as an introductory offer, just 1.99$, although this may change as I have added so many new features in this update.
Version 2.0 adds:
- All of the sites in the National Park Service, totaling 385 sites. (395 if you count park + preserve twice as the park service does.)
- A bold new home page with photos for the most common designations, plus a page to view sites by region w/ an region overview map.
- Dynamic “places” view to show all of the sites of a specific designation or region, plus progress (28/58 visited) and brief description of purpose of designation.
- Progress indicator when loading the app and when viewing every park of a type or in a region.
- A short description about each park service designation to help visitors understand how they differ. (Ex: historic park vs. site)\
- Moved “learn more about the NPS” to a separate page to simply home screen.
- Updated icons and loading screen.
- (Trial mode is limited to viewing the 58 national parks, and recording your first three visits.)
The National Park Checklist application was built using my Fifty States app as a starting point. Since that application’s initial version 1.0 release, I have made many updates which set the stage for me to create a similar application for the National Parks. In both apps, I now read the state/park data from an XML file, which makes it easier to do the initial data entry and to make updates should I want to add additional capabilities which require more data fields, or to simply fix a mistake in the data. Along the same lines, I am now saving/reading user data to a defined XML schema instead of relying on the IsolatedStorageSettings API. This allowed me to introduce a feature to “back up” your visits data. I plan to introduce an option to restore the data soon 
