epepep

The archived blog history of Per Liedman.

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What plane?

So, I've made my first Android application. That was a nice experience, especially after having hacked J2ME on Symbian for a short while. Only sad thing is that I haven't got an Android phone, so I can only use my app in the emulator, which is boring as hell, since it's a GPS based application. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself - so first some background about me, and then some more about that app.

Sometime in my early twenties, I once spent something like two whole days flying around the world in Microsoft Flight Simulator, in realtime. My old friends still like to remind me of this slightly autistic and highly nerdy feat once in a while. For my own part, it's mostly a reminder of the oceans of free time I had while studying at university (I distinctly remember spending a considerable amount of the hours over the pacific studying for some math course I took at the time).

These days, I don't even have flight simulator installed, but my interest in airliners and flying still linger in the back of my mind, and when the skies are clear, I often find myself drifting off, thinking about the contrails I see, what aircraft it might be, where they're heading and where they're coming from. In the last year, this little hobby has gotten a bit more interesting, thanks to a site called flightradar24.com, which makes it easy to check if it actually was a 747 that just passed by overhead, or if it was some other four engine model. (As a side note, flightradar24.com got a lot of media attention while the Icelandic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajökull grounded most air traffic over Europe for a couple of weeks, since everyone was very keen on seeing all the planes that weren't flying. That was sort of weird. Anyway.)

The only thing that isn't perfect about flightradar24.com for my little hobby, is that I'm not very often at a computer when I spot aircraft, and that their site is very Javascript-based, and hence not very useful in a phone browser. To solve this issue, some on and off hacking for a couple of months have resulted in a solution:

The Symbian version is still a bit too much of a hack to actually show to anyone else, but the server parts and the Android application is in a state which I feel is sort of usable. So, if you're interested, here's the application file for version 1.0.0 of What plane?, which will show you the five aircraft closest to where you are, their direction and distance, and some more detailed information on model, airline, where they're heading, and so on.

WhatPlane-1.0.0.apk Updated 2010-08-10: WhatPlane-1.0.1.apk Updated 2011-06-09: WhatPlane-android-1.1.1.apk

...and for those anxious of you who absolutely need screenshots, here's a couple of those: [caption id="attachment_171" align="alignnone" width="324" caption="List of closest aircraft"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_172" align="alignnone" width="328" caption="Aircraft details"][/caption]

For those interested, I plan to make the source available at some point in the future (that I haven't done it already is mostly because I don't know where it's best to host it, and I haven't got that much time to work on this). Also, it must be noted that all the data shown in the application is from flightradar24.com - and it's really their data. I haven't checked with them if it's ok to use it in this way, but since they're a free service, aggregating information mostly from enthusiasts sharing the data from their ADS-B receivers, I hope this application is in the spirit of their vision.