Release Candidate One with Chris Clark

Many years ago when I lived in Perth, Western Australia, I started work on a widget that would fetch the lowest petrol prices from around the city and show them in your Mac OS X dashboard. Actually I finished it, several times over, but never released it because it had no icon, no website, and a tiny, tiny potential market. Truth be told I’m still afraid of the support email from people who want me to add their city to the widget, which is something I simply can’t do.

See, one of the peculiarities of the Western Australian government is that it requires every gas station in the state to report its fuel prices every day, and leave those prices static for 24 hours. This is to prevent predatory pricing practices where a station might start the day with extremely low prices for the media attention, then jack up the price when the crowds arrive. Seems like a lot of effort to prevent something that reputation should solve by itself, but it has the nice side-effect of producing FuelWatch: a government funded database of daily fuel prices from around the state. Their website even publishes dynamic RSS feeds with a crudely hackable query string; the REST API from hell.

Eventually I wrote a web service here at RC1 to query, parse, and cache a lightweight JSON representation of the data so the widget could enjoy a little performance boost. But why release it now, when I don’t even live in Perth? Well, my friend Louie Mantia gave me a gorgeous icon and kept prodding me to release it, and he’s a very persistent character, and I threw together a little project page to experiment with Safari’s nifty -webkit-gradient declaration, and before I knew it all my reasons for stalling were gone.

So if you’re one of the half-dozen readers of this blog from my home town, go grab yourself a copy of Refuel, put your home and office suburbs on the back, and take a peek whenever you’re low on gas. If you bug me enough, I might even get around to writing an iPhone version. Someday. Maybe.