Blog update and status update

Hello, fellow aviators!

I am in the process of moving the blog to free hosting, because I cannot justify paying for hosting for it any more. This blog is not as flexible but it meets the needs of this project.

Regarding status, it has been some time since I did any development on the Pilot Altimeter & VSI. This has mainly been the case for personal reasons. At present, family and professional commitments and the fact that I am not active as a pilot have meant that the project has had to take a back seat. In addition, the project is in need of quite a bit of updating. I don't think it builds with the latest version of Android Studio and it needs to be updated to use the latest Android APIs. This is a requirement before any updates can be published to the Google Play store.

The positive side is that I work with Android professionally as a software engineer, so that will help me update the project when I have time.

I have open sourced the project so if anybody would like to enhance it, that is of course possible. You can find the project here:

https://github.com/phabvionics/pilot-altimeter

Status 2012-12-25

Christmas Day it is, now, here in the UK. Merry Christmas to all!

Work is in progress on the first Android app that I intend to publish. It's going to provide you with a moving map from the GPS of your device, and allow you to select from the nearest airports so that you can navigate towards them. It will of course show you ground speed, GPS altitude (note that this is not the same as barometric altitude) and the bearing of the track made good. It will also provide an indication of how accurate the GPS signal report indicates it is. If you are tracking towards an aerodrome, it will provide a means of providing horizontal guidance.

I have algorithms in place that will calculate great circle distances and bearings and sort the nearest aerodromes to any given point on the surface of the earth in order of nearness. I need to implement a graphical display and a means of selecting the aerodrome to which you wish to navigate.

I will be testing with two devices: an Orange San Francisco (aka ZTE Blade) running Cyanogenmod 7.1 (Android 2.3.7) and my Christmas present, a Nexus 7. As a sole trader with no capital behind me, obviously I can't provide any more testing than that.

This may not seem like much. I have many more ideas, but I must start somewhere! This type of application is quite complex, and there are so many variants of Android that have to be considered; the main problem is different screen sizes and resolutions. I want to get something out there that will immediately be useful to people, so that is my current goal.