Saturday, June 09, 2012

Find my Plane

At Genexus we had a little contest. We had a few contest before where we asked customers and friends to create a cool app for Smart Devices with our brand new Smart Devices generator. Of course we could not participate, it would be unfair… (or at least that’s what they thought).

So a month ago, Gastón told us we would have an internal contest, it was called “GX Challenge (Developer Edition)” in which whoever wanted to participate had to build an app. Who wins? whoever gets the most downloads per app.

The most difficult thing is of course to come up with a good/cool idea, and I’m not saying that I finally came to a real good idea, with it was something that I’d definitely enjoy doing. So that’s how Find my Plane appeared.

Find my Plane is a simple app where you enter a flight number and the app would give you info about the flight. From where to where, terminal and gate (where available) and if the flight is on time or delayed, and even as Nicolás found out, if the plane was diverted to a different location.

But it was still too simple. Who would download an app like that if you can get that info and more from other apps? So I added a few things. First, thanks to wunderground.com API I added the weather of both departure and arrival airports of the flight, plus another small feature that is being able to listen to the air traffic controllers available from the mentioned airports. You can get all that from different apps, but I haven’t seen one with all those features combined so I thought it would be a cool app, and fun to develop.

It’s been on the Android Marketplace (AKA Google Play) for over 2 weeks now with a little over 100 downloads plus 200+ downloads from the Apple Marketplace in less than a week.

Here’s a little video of what the app looks like (on the Android emulator)

Like what you see? Download it now!

http://bit.ly/FMPAndroid

http://bit.ly/FMPiOS

p.s: Did I mention it is FREE!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It would be even better if users are given the following options:

1. to choose the airline; users may not know/remember the 2-letter prefix before the flight number.

2. search by flight route - please refer to FlightAware app.

Sebastián Gómez said...

Thanks for your feedback!
As I write these lines I am working on finding the airline, you'll get that in the next version.

I'll keep in mind what you suggested about flight routes.