My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar
jacobbartlett.substack.com
jacobbartlett.substack.com
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435908 My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar (1304 points, 56 days ago)
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.
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.
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
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.
There is a horizontal row of elements for the Seasons of a show, and then below that is a horizontal row of thumbnails for each episode in that season.
The only way you know whether you are currently focused on the Seasons or the Episodes row is that the element you are focusing is perhaps 2.5% larger than the other elements.
There is no border, no shaders over the element - nothing to tell you where you are without arbitrarily moving the focus around just to gather some context.
And you certainly aren't going crazy either, I shipped a last-minute bug-fix where I got the cloud icon the wrong way around compared to everything else
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...
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.)
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.
I’m not sure I agree. Value is a deep and multi-faceted concept. It’s very likely that your child would value the games they can purchase with Robux(it’s my understanding that Roblox has a bunch of games that can be purchased?).
Do you want X or do you want five cheeseburgers?
$15 on Stardew Valley or three Big Macs?
Decide!
The idea of the badges is to teach things to deepen a child's understanding of planes (planes fly all around the world! At all heights! They are many different sizes!) instead of driving "Average Active Time Spent In The App To Get Special Widgets To Spend In The Radar Flight Store."
Wondering if I can get my hands on a vision pro for #1 :)
This suggestion may put me on the road to find some renewed joy in programming.
If you do want to build it, I'm happy to share the iOS source with you!
reaperman_hn@protonmail.com
email in my profile
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.
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.
Apple products and animations generally have more smoothing and hysteresis; my presumption is that the accuracy is hidden from the user in an effort to make sure that the arrow doesn't fluctuate wildly, whereas the android UI is more likely to show artifacts from the 'noisy' GPS/IMU fusion and inherent magnetometer inaccuracies.
'Slow arrow' was one of the things that kind of drove me crazy in iOS back in the old days now with faster hardware I notice the 'twitchy' arrow more on other platforms.
tl;dr: Most modern hardware is pretty equal as far as being able to determine its' place in space and time with decent accuracy now , but not all navi software is equal in terms of dead reckoning accuracy and pose estimation given the current data and the user expectation of noise filtering while handling the phone.
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.
Side note, I'm tempted to place a !remindme in 18 years to check if your daughter managed to pass her flight control exams ;)
That kind of thing definitely wouldn't happen post 9/11.
My kids just ask as we are boarding the plane if the cockpit door is still open.
JetBlue US Domestic
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!
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.
We had, on advice from a nurse, tried to rule out milk protein earlier by mother not drinking any milk. She did however not say that you have to do that for a very long time before you can see any results. Think it was at least three-four weeks until you could say if it worked or not.
Luckily the milk protein allergy grows away before 7 years old and she is perfectly fine with milk now.
Good work!
Love it!
Alternatively you can just look at the web version and guess which one you're seeing. https://www.radarbox.com/
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?
0: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/9e5f8f12-0369-46af-bd50-d...
Would the correct orientation be rotated of mirrored?
I built it from London so the sky-area I calibrated it for might be really small for someone in the rural Americas
Why is this downvoted? I thought it was a nice idea.
That's a neat idea though, I'm picturing some kinda hyperlocal room-level location tracking!
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...
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!
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.
The SSR receiver is usually a long conic rotating dish, the length provides lateral isolation, as the dish itself is tilted up to match the runway glideslope (inbound and outbound track for most transmitting aircraft).
The SSR can receive information well beyond the range of the primary radar. For an air traffic controller, a commercial aircraft shows up on the SSR first, and can be directed right away. The primary radar mainly catches anomalous behaviour, foreign objects and GA aircraft that may not be equipped with UAT.
There several more pressing safety issues with analogue equipment than simple electrocution:
- Fire risk due to the much greater energy consumption of older discrete components. Even the passive losses when in standby are considerable; the need for heatsinks is a given, and ventilation is critical.
- Explosion (actually implosion) risk of vacuum tubes/thermionic valves. There are a surprising number of videos online of people deliberately destroying TVs with overvoltage, but suffice it to say that you do not want one plugged into the mains during a thunderstorm.
- Physical injury. Not really the fault of the technology per se, but it can be easy to forget just how physically light modern equipment is. You can hurt yourself by trying to move older devices. Having the equipment fall on them is probably the biggest risk to a toddler who's not actually trying to take the device apart.
To a toddler, it's all the same.
You're right, but the thing was made for a toddler and the "radar" label was probably made for them.
Honestly, "radar" is probably the clearest label for something like this for all people who don't know what ADS-B and RTL-SDR mean (which is probably 99% of all people, period).
And I think there are more avnerds on here than you would expect!
I also don't think you are being pedantic. This is a forum where technology is often the topic of discussion, and in tech words often have very specific meanings. Like radar.
No slight whatsoever to the original author, I liked the post, and applaud their work :)
I just don't get the downvoting nature of some of the folks here. This isn't reddit.