Rhys Butler

Fark is a simple parking app designed for use in multi-level, multi-bay carparks. Never put a level, row, section or bay in notes or your camera roll ever again - Fark yeah!

The Executive Summary

• Multi-level carpark focused - easily track and review which level / section / bay you parked in
• Simple, clean design including level colors makes finding your parking spot too Farking easy!
• Automatically track how long you have been parked, set reminders for paid parking or meters and receive additional reminder 15 minutes before and after the alarm time
• Map support, useful for street level or large outdoor parking lots, with quick access to map-only parking if required

What The Fark Were You Thinking?

Fark is a small passion project, because I have a terrible memory for things like this. I wanted (and looked for) a clean, clear and focused app designed to, quite simply, record where you parked. There must be a million apps for this, right? The answer isn’t so simple.

When I designed Fark, I deliberately chose a simplistic design and feature set, inspired by signage of parking maps or parking station columns and wanting to keep the cruft out of the application. Fark was designed to be a Pay-To-Unlock app, so as to keep the interface clean and free of advertisments or any clutter which distracts from the task at hand.

Stock maps applications have come a long way in terms of tracking your cars lst known location when you park the car. Typically, these apps will track your geo-coordinates, usually using a bluetooth connection and some other smarts to automatically detect when you finish a trip and leave your veichle. While this is a clever use of the available systems, it has some major drawbacks:

• Most older cars only support a single connection, what if there are multiple members of your family? Depending on who is connected at the time, one person has an accurate location, the other does not. In my experience with a shared veichle (Hyundai i40, 2013), this functionality is spotty, at best.
• Maps are focused on geo-coordinates, not levels, bays, etc. The “notes” sections of these maps apps are typically lacklustre and not well suited for quick entry or retrieval.
• There aren’t any 3rd-party apps like what I was looking for, most parking apps are geo-coordinates based aswell, typically not as smart Apple or Google Maps. In addition, most look, frankly, rubbish.

The Name

Find your Park… Fark. You might also notice to tongue-in-cheek nature of the name. What can I say, what’s the point of doing a side project if you can’t have some fun with it 😎 Besides, I am Australian 🇦🇺, it’s in our nature.

The Future

Other features on the wishlist if and as time permits:

• Sharing your location
• Make it easier to choose colours (possibly with a better selector or palette), and the ability to edit a session that’s in progress
• Being able to edit details for a running session would make it easier to add Bluetooth detection, which would be useful if you want to auto-start a session you can later adjust
• Basic WatchKit support - would be great to at least see a read only display of where you are parked.
• An improved alarm system
• Estimated walk time back to parked location
• Add support for iOS 12 Shortcuts
• Some other loftier goals like automatically determine available parking levels at known locations to provide single tap usage, and some others I’ll keep to myself for now.

Fark

As I catch the train to work, I don’t need to drive or park as often as others, yet my wife and I are able to make use of the app a handful of times a month.

So give the app a try… it can’t Farking hurt. 😏