January 18, 2010 By Matthew Spolar Monitor staff

5 questions about new iPhone applicationWhen Hillary Davis of Hancock was laid off as a corporate communications executive last year, she began taking a closer look at her phone.

The 52-year-old has created My Town Contacts, a new iPhone application that makes users compile a list of important phone numbers in case of emergency that they would not normally have on hand. The application debuted about two weeks ago and is available for $0.99 in the online iTunes store.

Why did you create My Town Contacts? It's sort of a two-pronged story. One is that I'm a Mac addict. I love the Mac computers. I love my iPhone. But I also had a need - I was on business three states away, my mom's older, and I hadn't heard from her in three days and I needed to check in.

So what did you do? I just thought, "Oh my god, I can't get a hold of my mother." I couldn't remember how one of her neighbors spelled her name, and the other neighbor was unlisted. (My mom) turned out to be fine . . . but I thought, "Wow, I really need an app for that."

How did you go about creating the application? To learn how to do all of this took me three months. What I'm doing is coming up with the idea, drawing it out on a piece of paper, doing the artwork, and figuring out where the buttons are going to be. And then I go out and find the developer to write the code.

Who wrote the code? I posted (online) that I have this job . . . and somebody wrote back very nicely that he would do it. He happened to be in China.

What kinds of contacts do you input into the application? It has 18 categories, and it asks you for your doctor's name, people at your kids' school, your town hall, your veterinarian for your animals. It even has your favorite restaurants. . . . It's just anything connected to your home town that you want to get a hold of quickly.

Concord Monitor, Concord, New Hampshire