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My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar
- Jerry2 3y agoI tried to run that app like 5 times since it was released and it failed to connect to the server every single time.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoReally sorry about this, are you rural by any chance? I believe there is an error message if there is nothing found overhead; as a Londoner I don't think I properly prepared for the less crowded airspaces!
- transcriptase 3y agoI’ve had the same issue in rural Canada. Installed a few times and thought it was high traffic from HN causing issue, but that makes more sense as there’s probably only a plane overhead for me twice a day!
- jakey_bakey 3y agoThanks for confirming! Sounds like my error handling logic needs work. I built it from London so the sky-area I calibrated it for might be really small for someone in the rural Americas
- saagarjha 3y agoOne thing I would mention is that using TipKit to explain your UI is often a sign that things aren't super easy to understand. When dealing with detents the typical way to make the UI understandable is have it so they cut off some content to indicate that there is more available.
- martinky24 3y agoMaybe this is pedantic -- Did you build a radar, or did you build a wrapper around an ADS-B API? I clicked this thinking, "Wow! Radars are hard. Building one at home would be quite the feat!", but this appears to just be a wrapper around an ADS-B data providing service? Not even reading the ADS-B data over the air on one's own at home? Calling this a radar, vs saying "I build a nice GUI around ADS-B data", are two very different things! The latter is a fun side project at home, but it's a couple orders of magnitude easier than the former!
- elSidCampeador 3y agoFYI, discussion on part 1 here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435908
- jakey_bakey 3y agoDoing God's work!
- dewey 3y agoYou are taking this too seriously and the answer can be found in the blog post. It's clearly a dad-daughter fun project and the toddler is more likely calling it a "Radar" and not "Can I play with the ADS-B API Wrapper?" which is the spirit of the whole post and app.
- anotherhue 3y agoListen, if you think handing a kid a cavity magnetron and the multi-kilowatt power supply to drive it ON TOP of a high-voltage CRT display is a good idea -- then I really want to know how it goes.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago"Back in my day..."
- nomel 3y agoWell, obviously that part would be on the roof, and you would hand the kid something that would, to them, be indistinguishable from the API approach, all as you nervously wait for authorities, from the nearby military base, to come check your intentions.
- liquidise 3y agoThis is a follow-up to a rather popular post from a couple months ago[0]. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435908 My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar (1304 points, 56 days ago)
- jakey_bakey 3y agoAw, shucks :)
- gridspy 3y agoNice one. I'm glad you're still pleasing your user base.
- dylan604 3y agofor the rest of his days probably
- jakey_bakey 3y agoWell, I am back to pleasing them after a brief 5-week production incident :)
- jshchnz 3y agoGood job on definitely making your most important user happy :)
- jakey_bakey 3y ago:)
- mschuster91 3y agoAwesome! Side note, I'm tempted to place a !remindme in 18 years to check if your daughter managed to pass her flight control exams ;)
- mulmen 3y agoShe’s 2 and can get a student pilot license at 16 so set a reminder in 14 years.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoDo we get free flights if our daughter is a pilot? Maybe we're missing a trick nudging her into STEM
- fragmede 3y agothere's a whole buddy pass system for friends/family of airline crew. short answer: yes, but.
- UberFly 3y agoThis is cute and touching. I'm jealous. I miss it when my daughters were this age. Awesome work dad.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoThank you :) I suppose the grass is always greener, right? I'm simultaneously at the (irrational) age where I'm missing the baby stage and excited for her to learn to play video games with me
- shermantanktop 3y agoYou'll never stop missing the baby stage. The entire period from 3 months to around 5-6 is magical - they are seeing new things, trying new things, learning at a voracious rate, and constantly surprising you. They are still great after that but they are more on their path to who they will become, and mom and dad of course become a little less cool. Mine are grown and are wonderful people, but I can't tell you what I would give to go back and spend a day at the park with them at 3-4 years old.
- willsmith72 3y agocue the grandchildren
- methyl 3y agoYour mileage may vary. I don’t miss this age at all, at 3-6 months a baby is not much more than a moving blob. I enjoy it now way more at the age of three.
- shermantanktop 3y agoI have the benefit/drawback of hindsight from years later. Before 3ish months, I'm with you - it's the "fourth trimester." May depend on the kid too. Mine were relatively calm and quiet, but there were some <1y babies that I met who appeared to scream and cry every waking moment.
- lesmond 3y agoI am the co-founder of Planefinder.net. We’ve been tracking aircraft since 2009. Good work! Love it!
- delichon 3y agoMy house is below a rural MOA airspace and occasionally gets buzzed by extremely low flying military aircraft. It can be window rattling, ground shaking and heart rate elevating. Do you know of a way I can get an alert even a little bit before that happens? Is it theoretically build-able with existing data?
- jakey_bakey 3y agoGame recognise game ;)
- Logans_Run 3y agoWho here in the HN crowd would be up for porting this to Android as a sort of open-source crowdsource project? Any takers? At a guess (about licensing) I would say that whoever sets up the initial GH repo uses this quote from the author " waiting for an enterprising Android engineer to port it themselves—I’ve placed enough detail in these posts! You’re welcome to do so, just make it free for everybody."
- david_allison 3y agoNo long-term capacity to maintain it, but I can probably contribute a little. email in my profile
- jakey_bakey 3y agoGood man!
- reaperman 3y agoThanks for the suggestion to do something like this! I've never made a mobile app but would love to learn how. Even if it's not to contribute to a high quality Android app for this radar thing, choosing to spend some of my time porting anything like it which also falls into the "An app can be a home-cooked meal"[0] paradigm likely means that grokking the code will be easier than with because it will be programmed with a singular vision/paradigm and lack bloat/adware/tracking/etc which would complicate reading and understanding the existing code. This suggestion may put me on the road to find some renewed joy in programming. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423
- jakey_bakey 3y agoHonestly I was hoping to inspire something like this; where someone wants to learn to build something interesting that isn't just another todo app tutorial If you do want to build it, I'm happy to share the iOS source with you!
- reaperman 3y ago
- oneepic 3y ago>As always, it’s uniquely gratifying to create something my daughter wants to play with. I look forward to her developing many more interests — with any luck, soon she’ll get super into platforming games or heavy metal. I got into heavy metal because of the Tony Hawk games (THPS3 - Motorhead's "Ace of Spades", THPS4 - Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast"). So there's a potential breadcrumb trail.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoI appreciate your wisdom
- tgtweak 3y agoDoes it blip planes when the radar scan rolls over them and they stay in a static position but fade until the next sweep? That would be so cool. Would also be amazing to look at device current gps altitude and location to determine the visible skyline per azimuth based on openstreetmap buildings and hills/elevation around your current position and altitude... then you can show it on the map as a radar occlusion [1] - like a fish finder when you go over a log, or ship radar occluded by another vessel. I'm sure you'd cause some industry people to scratch their head and wonder how the phone is doing radial scanning [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Occlusion-percentage-for-Monte-Macaion-Weather-Radar-a-elevation-10-b-elevation_fig2_229044207 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Occlusion-percentage-for...
- jakey_bakey 3y agoI love all these ideas - my app is very much the Pareto version of the potential 100% complete version
- ponty_rick 3y agoOn a sidenote, do kids get invited into the cockpit anymore, in this post 9/11 world?
- rezz 3y agoI was on a flight last Thursday and saw this happen.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoIt was before we took off :)
- Ductapemaster 3y agoI've seen it happen while the plane is at the gate. The pilots usually have the door open, and you can go up and talk to them. Worst case they say no, so its worth an ask. Somewhere I still have a Delta wing pin from a trip I took as a kid and got to see the cockpit en route. Very cool experience that I remember to this day — I hope your and others' kids get to experience some piece of it themselves!
- lightyrs 3y agoMy 6-year old was invited into the cockpit for the first time on January 1, 2024. I was wondering the same as you up until that moment. JetBlue US Domestic
- sojournerc 3y agoMy Dad was a pilot, and we'd often align a family vacation with one of his flights. There was no prouder moment as a young kid than being invited into the cockpit to "start the engines" after push-back. I vaguely remember pushing some button and Dad pointing out a moving dial in the cockpit. I vividly remember walking back to my seat feeling like the biggest kid in the world. That kind of thing definitely wouldn't happen post 9/11.
- jedberg 3y agoMy kids have been in the cockpit post 9/11. But you have to do it before takeoff. They don't let anyone in there during flight, even the flight attendants (except the lead sometimes). My kids just ask as we are boarding the plane if the cockpit door is still open.
- bluepuma77 3y agoFirst app I see in the wild that only supports iOS 17. Maybe I will upgrade some day.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoThis is actually the first OS where this app is possible to build in SwiftUI - the MapKit annotations and Metal shaders are both brand new
- tobiasbischoff 3y agoCongrats and thanks for updating! Both of my kids are avid users.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoGlad to hear it! :)
- JoblessWonder 3y agoHere are my thoughts I left as a comment on the blog: I've got ideas! As a parent of a toddler myself, I felt that comment about picking the color... For sure the most important. Anyways, here is a feature list of things you may have considered but haven't implemented because this is just a fun side project! 1. Live view. Use the phone's camera and iPhone's AR capability to display a dot in the (general) area of the aircraft. I've done some coding on how to calculate this based on the user's position and ADSB info if you are interested! 2. Mark an aircraft as "seen" or "missed"* which would go into the next suggestion.... (*could even digest this feedback in somehow and fine tune what is displayed?) 3. Badges/Stats! If your daughter is anything like mine, she loves getting badges in apps. Maybe create a local DB of previous sightings so then you can track things like "number of different airlines", "number of different aircraft types", "farthest flight time spotted", "shortest flight time spotted" etc etc (Note: I understand and totally appreciate the possible issues around gamifying apps meant for consumption by children.)
- beachy 3y ago> If your daughter is anything like mine, she loves getting badges in apps This may sound curmudgeonly, but I try to drill into my son's awareness that he should aspire to be a producer of technology, rather than just a consumer. We face regular discussions about why he shouldn't spend $30 on Robux or some other digital currency. I try and explain that these digital currencies don't have real value like, say, a tennis racket or a pair of shoes. As such I also try and give him the tools to fight against gamification, and not to be sucked into grinding for hours to get some badge or other worthless digital artifact. So my 2 cents would be not to add features like this to an app aimed at kids. Let them see that there is a such a thing as a non-gamified, non-ad infested app that adds real value to their lives.
- mulmen 3y agoDevil’s advocate: is it possible that Robux teach children to contribute financially to the ecosystem’s they participate in? FOSS is famously not “free-as-in-beer” yet we have created the expectation that virtual goods including software do not have financial value. Could being raised on Robux create an incentive to make modest financial contributions to software projects?
- amelius 3y agoMaybe nice if the toddler can see on the radar where daddy is too. Why is this downvoted? I thought it was a nice idea.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoI think the downvoters read it as a snide comment that I should spend more time parenting and less time on side projects That's a neat idea though, I'm picturing some kinda hyperlocal room-level location tracking!
- cja 3y agoThere can be a temptation as a parent to practice our hobby in a way that makes us feel that we are engaging with our child when actually our child would be just fine with FlightRadar and more of daddy. I'm not judging (really) because every family has different circumstances and every person is different, I just know that I jumped into this trap a few times and you are reminding me of myself back then. Brain Rules for Baby is an excellent way to learn how your child works, or at least I found to be so. Anyway, you're nearly at Brio and then Lego and it gets better and better...
- wkjagt 3y agoThis looks really cool and has a wonderful story behind it. But I’d have to get a new phone to try it, as my OG iPhone SE only supports up to iOS 15, and the App Store says this requires iOS 17…
- jakey_bakey 3y agoMy apologies, unfortunately this was only possible in SwiftUI with some of the new features (which I naturally wanted to try out!)
- wkjagt 3y agoI’m sorry if it came across as a complaint. It’s just the consequence of me sticking with this 8 year old phone. I’m a bit sad I can’t try your awesome looking project, but it’s because of my own stubbornness :-)
- RedOrGreen 3y agoVery nice, even with no planes overhead. But it looks like the map orientation is reversed (off by 180 degrees)? Real bug, or just me?
- jakey_bakey 3y agoWhat hemisphere are you in by any chance? I am not an expert on geolocation theory so I may just not know how MapKit works :)
- AdhemarVandamme 3y agoAlso, are you looking at your phone screen up from above, or screen down from below with the sky behind it? Would the correct orientation be rotated of mirrored?
- ppod 3y agoSlightly off-topic but a question I've been wanting to ask: as someone with a terrible sense of direction, the most important feature in a phone for me is the accuracy of the little arrow on the map that shows me which way I'm facing. I'm an android user, and it kind of shows a blue "cone of uncertainty" when it isn't sure which way its pointing, and occasionally asks either to move the phone in a figure of eight or to point at nearby building to calibrate. What is the limiting factor here, technologically? Are iPhones better than android? Is it the hardware (accelerometer?!, compass?), the GPS signal, the software? It still, quite often, seems to get confused and show the cone in the wrong direction. It's so important to me that I would almost switch to iPhone if it definitely works better.
- evook 3y agoAs someone using both equally often, I am kind of certain Android passes through the raw sensor readings while iOS has some form of debounce delay and guesstimation implemented. Both are equally often off in their readings. But that's just based on usage experience, not a hard fact.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoGlad you said this - I actually made the same observation in the original post! I assumed maybe there was some kind of GPS limiting factor, but the CoreLocation orientation delegate perfectly returns your orientation, at least at my device's 120Hz frame rate. I think Google Maps might just be bad.
- kderbyma 3y agoI think it could be about hiding the level of accuracy. I remember sometime back learning that there are many cases where sounds are added back for comfort and the expected experience that customers are used to, so perhaps this is one of those cases where they have continued as a company to mask their true power and just like with everything they do, they cannot appear to be a monopoly so they need to fake the accuracy defects and all that while behind the scene they are actually tracking it all ..... who knows.
- 3y ago
- issung 3y agoAnyone working on an Android port yet? I might try my hand at a React Native port as a learning experience. Or is Flutter better?
- anadem 3y agothere's some discussion upthread, a couple of hours before your post
- dylan604 3y agoOne thing that I'm noticing with the app is something I experienced from my days of DVD programming. It is not clear which mode is currently active with the toggle buttons. It is not obvious if the flag is showing you the current mode or if the button needs to be pressed to get the indicated mode. To toggle the weather, do you click the clouds to show cloudy mode or to view clear view or vice versa. It almost feels inverted to me. I'm also having the same issue on a current project. There's a set of +/- buttons that control the size of a time range window. Clicking the +/- buttons increase/decrease the size of the window, but for the start time + makes the time seconds value smaller, and - makes the seconds value larger. For the end value, it is exactly the opposite. But for the window size, both sets of buttons do what one expects. So it's a matter of perspective that needs to be clear to the user.
- d0gsg0w00f 3y agoThis is what I hate most about modern UX-- especially on TV apps. A menu with two items: one is bold white and the other is bold black. What am I about to click? The youtube captions toggle is guilty of this too. It toggles between black on white and white on black. I just have to click it and wait until I see someone's lips moving with no captions then try the other icon mode. It's like the move to touchscreen erased everyone's common sense for stateful positional input feedback.
- dylan604 3y agoNot sure about common sense and touch screen as it's been around for much much longer. It's also something easily not considered when one is not trained in the ways of the UI. However, it is something that is easy to understand once it is pointed out to you and you are the one under the microscope for it. For example, in this specific app, the flag/no flag is easier to discern its use compared to the cloud/sun icon. It doesn't follow the same logic as the flag/no flag. It could be cloudy/not cloudy cloud or sunny/not sunny, and then it follows the flag. Consistency between buttons is important
- KTibow 3y ago> YouTube captions toggle While I've seen similar problems the captions toggle hasn't been one of these for me. On desktop it uses a red underline when activated which is very clear that it's currently activated. On other platforms, I've seen the button's background toggle between translucent button with outlined icon to white button with filled icon, which I find intuitive but I guess others might not.
- mrcarruthers 3y agoAs another father of a plane loving toddler, one of her favourite questions is "where's it going?". I'm wondering if some flight information is available and could be shown by selecting the plane.
- papertokyo 3y agoAs an adult who often wonders this, RadarBox's AR mode (available on the iPhone app) is perfect. You just point it in the general direction of the plane, tap on the flight number, and it will show you all the details. Alternatively you can just look at the web version and guess which one you're seeing. https://www.radarbox.com/ https://www.radarbox.com/
- michaelfoster 3y agoNeat, my 2-year old is also excited about planes and this is exactly the of application I had envisioned.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoTheir feedback is welcome!
- szundi 3y agoOf course the toddler is who loves them, haha
- rthkljlkrj 3y ago[dead]
- weinzierl 3y ago"One would think, as an enterprising indie developer, I’d jump straight on top of the hype train, shoot out another release, and begin dreaming up monetisation opportunities." My (now) 12 year old and me are working on a little game for a while. It started as a purely educational project, but I think it turned out good enough to be published. I don't want to commercialize it for multiple reasons, but I'm curious how this will go on the App Store. There are few truly and completely free apps so this is kind of uncharted territory. Since Apple does not earn anything from free apps, I can imagine they are not very keen on having them in the store. I am very curious to hear what experiences others had with publishing free apps. Was it hard to get them approved? Were they pulled from the store?
- nelc 3y agoInspired by the previous post, I made a version for the round Garmin watches. [0] I also tested and added support for a few ADS-B data providers. Unfortunately, the Opensky data in my area is quite poor and I couldn't display as much detail info compared to adsbexchange. 0: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/9e5f8f12-0369-46af-bd50-dbbfdcddcc55 https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/9e5f8f12-0369-46af-bd50-d...