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Apple’s hidden flight tracker app
- jamil7 4y agoWe use this in our app, it's very US-heavy though I think. NSDataDetector can do a lot of cool stuff, very ugly API to use and is confusingly similar but not the same to what's available through dataDetectorTypes on a UITextView.
- pjot 4y agoThis appears to be the struct[0] [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidatadetectortypes https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidatadetect...
- LeoNatan25 4y agoIt’s actually a C enum. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidatadetectortypes?language=objc https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidatadetect...
- jamil7 4y agoRight, would be nice for them to unify these.
- square0ne 4y ago
- mikebonnell 4y agoThis is a really cool feature, thanks for sharing! This also highlights the downside of iOS, so many features are hidden or hard to discover :(
- cjsawyer 4y agoI was shocked when I accidentally selected text out of an image. You’d think they’d make a bigger deal about cool changes
- the_biot 4y agoIt's pretty amazing how Apple does incredible stuff on the down-low, without lots of marketing. Their Google-street-view-like feature is just an unobtrusive link that says "look around" or something like that in their maps app on the iphone. Never mind that this is a massive amount of work, and that they're in the process of mapping all of Europe, and I assume the US.
- mattzito 4y agoIt was a pretty big part of the keynote where they announced it, I think it’s just that they don’t really do in-product promos for new features in iOS.
- dagmx 4y agoFor that specific feature they did/do highlight it quite a bit: - it was shown off at the keynote last year https://youtu.be/TfRMXk53wPY https://youtu.be/TfRMXk53wPY - I believe the tips app will mention it to you - they have support articles describing it https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT212630 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT212630 - any text field you're in will let you scan text directly from the camera. Granted, maybe they could go further to show people when they go into the photos app or something, but it's definitely a very highlighted feature relative to others.
- zwily 4y agoApple likes end users to discover stuff like that on their own. They hyped it up a ton at the WWDC keynote before it came out, but only a small % of mostly developers see that. Part of their philosophy is to delight users along the way and maybe finding things like that is delightsome? They rarely throw "check out the new features!" dialogs on upgrades. (Sometimes they do, but it's rare relative to the # of new features.)
- pvinis 4y agoHuh. is that a US thing only? Doesn't seem to show up for me. Currently in Cyprus, normally based in UK.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoNot US-only, I use it in Canada and Europe frequently.
- unfoldedCravat 4y agoI've found that prepending "Flight" i.e. "Flight LH173" works when it doesn't detect the flight number by itself
- s09dfhks 4y agohttps://scribe.rip/macoclock/apples-hidden-flight-tracker-app-397982fcc0d https://scribe.rip/macoclock/apples-hidden-flight-tracker-ap...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shmde 4y agoThis is a lot more readable than the medium site. Thanks.
- _xnmw 4y agoDoesn't work with every flight number. Not sure what the criteria is.
- mrweasel 4y agoMy guess is that it works for certain airlines. I tried the three next flights fromthe local airport. Some of those are just one letter and three numbers. That makes it pretty hard to make assuption regarding the meaning of the code, without having a reference.
- tyingq 4y agoIt's likely expecting IATA style flight numbers, which would all be two letters (or a letter/number) airline code, followed by some amount of numbers.
- exidy 4y agoSeems a bit random -- QF1 works, QFA1 doesn't. SQ208 doesn't work, SIA208 does. But SQ21 works and SIA21 doesn't, so it's not even consistent within airlines. Might be related to whether or not the flight is currently active.
- tyingq 4y agoAh, that is interesting, so it's taking both IATA and ICAO, but not consistently.
- dpeck 4y agoThere is one of these for sports scores too and it drives me crazy that there’s not an easy way to use it directly. For instance, I like to keep up with my colleges sports teams, but I don’t need the live tracker stuff (if I wanted that I’d watch the game on tv). But I’d love to have a Home Screen button that would bring up the “app” for “Georgia Tech baseball score” or “Georgia Tech basketball score” to quickly see what’s going on what I’m in between meetings at work or out doing something with the family. No ads, no frills, it’d be gloriously simple and I assume there is some way to do it but I could not find it.
- dvtrn 4y agohttp://plaintextsports.com http://plaintextsports.com has become one of my favorite websites for every single reason you just went off about
- CodeIsTheEnd 4y agoThank you! (I made plaintextsports!) On my to-do list is making a personalized page where you can select exactly which teams you want to follow, something closer to what dpeck wants, but I've been having trouble finding the time...
- dpeck 4y agoThis would be awesome! I love plaintext sports and the minimalist aesthetics of it. Curious, it seems college baseball scores are generally not as easy to find as others. Do they tend to be behind more restrictive APIs, or is it more just that there’s so little interest in it vs MLB?
- CodeIsTheEnd 4y agoFor college football and basketball I just use some JSON endpoints that the ncaa.com frontend hits, and they're actually very good. Literally all I had to do to support Women's basketball in addition to Men's was change "men" to "women" in the url. I haven't checked the data for baseball, but I'm sure it's more than adequate. That being said, I personally don't have any interest in college baseball, and I don't think it has a huge following, so I'm not going to invest any time into it, especially when there are higher profile leagues that I still haven't added yet (specifically, all of European football).
- behnamoh 4y agoI wonder what other iOS features are buried in the OS that I don't know about...
- tzs 4y agoI don't know if this is something new or I just am noticing it for the first time, but if I'm in an app for a site that sends an SMS code during login, taping the text entry field after the SMS is received extracts the code and offers to fill it.
- Scoundreller 4y agoI’ll probably never do it, so I’ll throw it out here as an idea: A journey-constrained social network. E.g. if you frequently travel between New York and Paris, you’ll be allowed to join the JFK-CDG group, then you can talk about travel deals, where to go in each city (as you’re likely from there or going there, and it’s a fair exchange with the other groups), what’s cheaper or worth buying as a gift from one place back to the other, etc. Doesn’t have to be flight specific as the journey method.
- cmeacham98 4y agoLeaving aside other problems (are there really enough travelers for pairs other than the most traveled airports?), how could you ever verify this?
- moralestapia 4y agoAre you in the middle of the ocean moving at 600mph towards <destination>?
- evan_ 4y agoThat determination would need to be done client side and is therefore vulnerable to spoofing
- cmeacham98 4y agoA: Obviously spoofable B: GP said the intent was for "frequent travelers", i.e. I'm assuming one-off travelers are intended not to be allowed. Having to verify multiple trips before you can get in sounds like a horrible user experience.
- samstave 4y agoMe and a partner actually have an MVP built out for this. Its kind of stagnate right now, but this specifically does this: Define areas of interest. Create tour routes. Geo-specific content (You can post audio, links, etc, to a particular point of interest. When you arrive within the designated (content poster defined) area, and are within a certain range of the POI - the content can be auto played, such as the audio description of a view point, landmark etc. It will do way finding and pathing... We have a working MVP on android, but like I said its currently dormant. One feature that is useful to emergency responders is the ability to provide geo-cache locations, so when the scouts for firefighters are scoping a best route to address front-line wild fire, they can mark a point where they leave an equipment cache, take a photo of it and share the route with firefighters. We have a digital LED wayfinding strip in the brim of a hat - so you have the way finding light compass to tell you the way. We have a patent on the hat...
- ronyfadel 4y agoMade me smile :D The person who made this at Apple worked on this directly in front of me.
- rlt 4y agoHow many Rony Fadel / Tony Fadell jokes have you had to put up with?
- ronyfadel 4y agoNot too many actually!
- ramesh31 4y agoThank you guys for keeping user delight at the forefront of everything. No one else does it like Apple.
- russelldjimmy 4y agoI think the fact that this post was downvoted speaks a lot. Sorry bud. I, too, am a fan and believe that not many do it the way Apple does.
- smoldesu 4y agoWhat is it saying, exactly? I'm listening but I don't hear anything.
- petemill 4y agoGoogle has had this for maybe 10 years. Type a flight number in to google and get the exact same info.
- peanut_worm 4y agoI feel like Apple has a hard time making all of the features of their products easily discoverable.
- reactjavascript 4y agoI would go further and say discoverability seems to be a low or nonexistent priority industry-wide.
- halJordan 4y agoI disagree, it was perfectly integrated into messages and spotlight. He discovered it as soon as it came up. The paradigm is "I have to have an app for that." Fwiw, for how poorly siri, spotlight, and shortcuts are utilized by end users Google has it even worse on Android.
- russelldjimmy 4y agoThere is a cost to making features discoverable. The cost is visual complexity. Apple can present only one UI to every first time user. They need to make hard choices about what to keep and what to remove so that the most non-technical user does not feel overwhelmed. At the same time, they have to figure out subtle ways to gauge user intent and carefully make a feature discoverable such that only the user who might consider using it (a power user) discovers and acts on it, while not getting in the way of the average Joe. It’s more art than science and I watch this with fascination. Not many companies seem to have the attitude of being totally OK with hiding features that took time and money to make. To me, it’s quite clear that Apple is OK with letting a hundred power users miss a hidden feature than having even one non-techie overwhelmed with choice anxiety (I am exaggerating the numbers surely).
- TooSmugToFail 4y agoI’m in Europe, running iOS 15.4.1 and it does not work for me. Tried 5-6 flights to SFO, and none of them worked.
- fredguth 4y agoSame in Brazil. Maybe it only works with flights in US.
- deepdmistry 4y agoI am in US, running iOS 15.5 and I tried US flights as well as international flights but it still doesn’t work for me.. so not sure if there is some privacy setting blocking it or if some feature we need to enable.
- mrunseen 4y agoDoes work for me for Turkish airline operators (I tried TK and PC)
- FR10 4y agoI think it barely works outside of the US, but this is usual with most of the quick actions in Spotlight. Its kinda crazy all the extra options you get on Spotlight once you land in the USA.
- t0mas88 4y agoWorked for me with KL flight numbers, but only a few and they were all enroute to or from the US at the time of searching. So that may have something to do with it? Edit: KL605 to SFO worked while typing (it's in the air now), KL1125 to Copenhagen did not work while typing but did show up after pressing search (it's in the air now). Similar for KL713 to Paramaribo worked after pressing search, while it's still on the ground.
- ch_sm 4y agoIt’s been reliably working for European flights for me for years. shrug
- ghostly_s 4y agohttps://archive.ph/rQrXh https://archive.ph/rQrXh
- rockbruno 4y agoThank you. I couldn't read the Medium at all since it forces you to have a subscription. I thought HN would have a rule against paywalled articles.
- barefeg 4y ago> Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- NaOH 4y agoSimilarly, someone texted me—technically, iMessages—shipment tracking numbers the other day. Two tracking numbers in three messages. Message 1: 123456789012 Message 2: Tracking number. Message 3: 2nd tracking, 210987654321 If I press and hold on the first tracking number, the menu of options is contact-info focused—call, WhatsApp, Add to Contacts, etc. If I do the same on the second number I get an option to Track Shipment. But I can paste both numbers into Spotlight and directly get tracking info. So I'm not certain why one tracking number behaves one way and a second another way.
- pcmoney 4y agoIt actually is not that useful because you cant base any actions off of it. Eg: “tell me if this flight is delayed etc”
- tedmiston 4y agohttps://archive.ph/rQrXh https://archive.ph/rQrXh