Lee Armstrong's Blog (30)

This year like those gone before there is a very well known event locally that goes on called Cowes Week.  It is an event where the Isle Of Wight gets a great selection of racing going on in the Solent and around the island itself.  And for those that don’t race the atmosphere is great with the Red Arrows and Fireworks featuring towards the end of the week!

Anyway, this year it starts on Saturday and we are always asked by our users if we…

Well in summary thank you for all the feedback but you seem to be enjoying them!

A couple of questions have cropped up so I though it would be best to summarise some of the common mistakes and how not to set up alerts.  If you wanted to see how to set up alerts then see my last blog post which gave some pointers on it.

A lot of people have asked about squawk codes…

Also new to version 2.60 released yesterday and largely overshadowed by the alerts feature was the addition of new plane models to the apps!

As you can see from the sample below they are very distinct  and hopefully it will help you identify those aircraft without having to drill down into it.  As usual this is part of the free upgrade to the latest version and early feedback so far has been great!

We have also added these icons in Yellow and Black as these…

We have been very busy at pinkfroot testing our alerts feature for our iOS apps and we are pleased to say that it has been released today!  

Here is a quick rundown so that you can see what it looks like and how to configure it to get some cool alerts!  We have been playing around with it for a few weeks now and have noticed some really nice things happening!  This is a rundown on the iPhone version but the screens are almost identical in the iPad…

We have been added to a publication that they have prodcued showcasing apps!

Go and check it out!  Can you spot us!?!?

 …

Wow, this is all so exciting and we had great feedback about the integration of the ash cloud into planefinder.net that we beavered away and added it to our iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch) apps.

So if you don't have the app already go ahead and click here to visit the app store.

Plane Finder

Plane…

Well we are at the end of a second day now and although the volcano has died down to a lot less activity it is still spewing out and with the strong UK winds it is sucking it all South.

Below is the VAAC chart on planefinder.net @ 1200 +12 hours so as you can see by tonight it will be just on the edge of Scotland!

 …

We have been busy since the London VAAC produced the charts of the ash cloud and predictions.  We thought that is would be great to visualise the impact on traffic if the ash cloud does get bigger!

 …

It is that time again when the European skies could be empty of planes once more!

The largest volcano on Iceland, Grimsvotn is erupting as we speak and spewing an ash cloud all the way up to 43,000ft!

If the winds are in the right direction and heading South then we could be in for another ground stop for all aircraft much like last time!

For those that missed it (or were asleep we had taken some screenshots of the last time this…

A man has reportedly fallen overboard on the Cruise Liner "Celebrity Eclipse"!!!

Search and Rescue teams from both sides of the channel attended last night at 22.15 BST.  The ship is currently docking in Southampton just now.

We brought up the Ship Finder logs and can see it did indeed stop and look around quite a bit!  Guardian article is here....

 …

A lot of you have been using the new planefinder.net website now for a few weeks.  We have spend some time fixing a few of the bugs and are now ready to unleash it publicly for the first time.  Here is a small round-up of the new features that we think you will enjoy the most!

Late last year a new breed of Windows Mobile device came out that we got very excited about here at pinkfroot.

Old Windows Mobile devices have been buggy, crashed a LOT and not that pretty to look at.  I remember though that there wasn't much choice back in the day for business communications except for BlackBerry.  And we need to not forget that smart phones originated from this market!

So when the latest "Windows Phone" (as they rebranded from Windows…

Each year a great website (TUAW.com) run a poll for the best iOS application.  Please can you take 2 minutes to vote for Plane Finder.

http://vhm.me/4upa

It would be great if we could beat those angry birds!

Thanks,

Lee

UPDATE 1920 18/11 GMT - We're back! Thanks to all those that have helped out along the way. You should be able to buy, update and do anything you want with the app in the store right now! Looks like the app store had a hiccup, albeit a week long one but more importantly we are back! We have lost our all…