Lunenburg Heritage Homes







This app is a feature-filled walking tour guide to 160 heritage buildings in the Old Town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site on account of its unusual and old residential architecture.

Each site has a photo and description. There are visual references to architectural styles, sliding panoramas of the major streets, a recommended route, and links to reviews of local restaurants and accommodation. Also a feature allows automatic retrieval of nearby real estate listings.

The app shows your location in real time over a satellite view map image. Clicking an icon brings up a description of the nearest interesting building to where you are standing.

The app can be used remotely to study Lunenburg from afar and links with StreetView.

The initial release of this app is designed to run on a phone with a large (min 480 x 800 pixels, 3.7 inch) touchscreen, running Android 2.1 or higher.



INSTRUCTIONS ON USING THE APP

The opening page of the app has five icons which when clicked lead to various types of background reference material.

SITES
The first icon points to a page with all the homes listed. They can be searched by address, street or architect.

STREETS
The second icon points to a list of the streets in the Lunenburg where the homes are located.

STYLES
The third icon directs to a listing of the early architectural styles represented in Lunenburg.

REAL ESTATE
The fourth icon leads to a list of real estate listings for all of Lunenburg.

HISTORY
This leads to a brief description of Lunenburg's history.

Below the five reference icons, there are two buttons. The upper one leads to this instruction page.

The button Start Lunenburg Tour leads to the important map page of the app.


THE MAP PAGE
The Map Page opens at a location centred at the Fisheries Museum on the Lunenburg waterfront. By default the map is in satellite view and resembles an aerial photograph. The yellow circle dot below the centre of the map represents the site of one of the homes. The color and size of the circle indicate the significance of the home. The most important are marked in larger yellow circles followed by slightly smaller yellow circles for the next tier of homes. Lesser homes are marked in orange and minor homes in red. Clicking exactly on a circle causes the home's name to appear in red letters.

The Map Page has ten icons in two rows along the top. Four of these icons are familiar from the previous home page and serve the same function as before.

There are six new icons on the Map Page:


DESCRIPTION OF NEAREST SITE
The question mark icon brings up the description page for the closest home to the map centre. If it clicked a second time, the next closest house is described, and so on.

TOUR SHOWN
Clicking the pointing hand icon causes a recommended walking route to be displayed in blue. The icon turns blue at the same time. Clicking it a second time removes the blue route from the map.

STREET VIEW
The small yellow man icon brings up the Google Street View for that location, assuming that it exists as the views apply only to a narrow strip along some, but not all Lunenburg streets.

PLACES TO EAT
The Plate icon brings up the Yelp website with reviews of Lunenburg restaurants.


LOCATION BUTTONS
The last two icons on the right have important and powerful functions which rely on the GPS locations.

SHOW PATH
Clicking the footprint icon causes your route to be recorded and drawn as a yellow line path over the map as you move around. Every twenty seconds or so, the phone checks your actual position using GPS satellites and updates the route.
After this button is clicked, it turns red to indicate that your path is now being drawn. The numbers alongside show distance from the start.

TURN ON GPS
The important radio tower icon brings the centre of the map to align with your actual location. This tower icon must be activated in red for the route mapping (the footprint icon) and also for the Nearest Site query (the question mark icon at the upper left) to work properly.

Before this feature will work properly without crashing the app, the phone needs to have established a connection with the GPS satellite signal. Before starting the app, you must check your settings on the main phone page to make sure that the Location is set to use GPS satellites. Establishing an initial connection may take a moment or two. You can open the built in Google Maps application to see if the location is known. It will display as a blue triangle in the center of the Maps screen as soon as a connection is established. After this occurs, all aspects of the Lunenburg Tour app should work just fine.

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