Flight Tracker (software)

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Flight Tracker is a bundled widget in Apple Computer's Mac OS X 10.4 Dashboard software.

Flight Tracker tracks flights going all across the world. Using the FlightComm web service, Flight Tracker is able to return lists of found flights matching criteria by airline, depart location and arrive location, and in-flight information such as altitude, speed, tardiness, arrive and departure terminals. Altitude and speed information, however, is only available for flights traveling from within United States, and to the UK and Mexico. After a flight is selected, Flight Tracker visualizes the flight path information by estimating the geodesic that most efficiently connects the depart and arrive locations around the earth. The software then uses a mercator projection to map this line onto the 2D map image, and estimates flight position.

A little known fact: Flight Tracker displays a small plane icon with a drop shadow on the geodesic flight path. When altitude information is available, the offset of the drop shadow beneath the plane is drawn relative to the current altitude. The effect is that flights just taking off or landing have drop shadows immediately beneath the plane, while flights in mid air have larger offsets between the plane and the drop shadow.

Flight Tracker was first demoed by Steve Jobs at the Macworld Conference & Expo 2005 Keynote in San Francisco during a demo of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The demo didn't work, however, because the Steve Jobs' first demo computer crashed during a demo of Mail's slideshow capabilities, and certain debug settings were improperly configured on his backup demo computer that confused Steve.

Flight Tracker

Flight Tracker snapshot mid flight between Tokyo and London

[edit] External links

• Apple's Dashboard page
• Apple's Dashboard Developer page
• Apple's Dashboard widget download page
• Apple's Dashboard video
• DashboardWidgets.com Community for widget developers and users (unaffiliated with Apple)