There’s a long-standing feature request to create an animated “slide show” of your OpenFlights, and I was delighted to find out recently that it’s been done in the best way possible — by somebody else!

FlightGlobe is a nifty desktop application for Mac and Windows that takes an OpenFlights CSV export (“List flights”, then click on “CSV”) and displays them on an animated 3D globe that spins about as you criss-cross the world, providing a neat way of viewing your travels if you’ve been methodical about recording your flight dates.  While the current version is simple and straightforward, the Java source code is available so any programmers out there can try their hand at adding bells and whistles.  Give it a spin!

Syndicated,
-j.

I’ll be frank: the bit of code for importing flights from our friends at FlightMemory to OpenFlights has long been riddled with bugs, and that’s why we’ve at long last thrown out the bulk of the plumbing and rebuilt it with shiny new pipe.  This has already fixed a number of bugs (most notably, accented characters getting lost), but there may be loose fittings somewhere, so please let us know ASAP if something’s leaking on the floor somewhere.  The next roaches in queue to be swatted are this (can’t handle ICAO codes for airlines) and this (duplicates in database).  And if you’d be really keen on one-step imports (that is, give the site your FM password and it’ll slurp up all your flights), now would be a good time to say so!

Continue reading →

Like many other developers, I have hated the way Facebook handles applications for a long time: the APIs are buggy as hell, poorly documented, change constantly, crippled beyond belief, completely proprietary, a vast pain to test and debug, and increasingly obviously geared towards moving everything off the open Web and into Facebook itself.   But with several thousand OpenFlights users happily using the app, we put up with the pain.

But now the camel’s back is broken.  Only a few short weeks ago, Facebook announced that profile boxes were doomed and that all applications had to migrate to profile tabs.  We duly did so, only to get smacked in the face with another wet trout: as of today, profile tabs are also gone.  Their replacement?  Nothing: all applications have to live on their own pages within Facebook, and users aren’t allowed to attach them to their profiles in any way, shape or form.  Too bad if you want to share your flight map with your friends, because as of now, you can’t.

So we’re going to do the only thing we can: say a nice, big hearty “fuck you” to Facebook and start looking for alternatives.  Any suggestions?

(And just to be clear: the part of the OpenFlights Facebook app that feeds your flights to your Wall is not affected and not going away for the moment.  However, it’s a matter of time until Facebook breaks it again, and at that point we’ll probably nuke the app for good.)

Blackfaced,
-jani

We’ve been having a bit of trouble with our map servers lately, so I’m delighted to announce that we’ve just switched to new and, hopefully, more stable ones today.

The default “political” blue-and-gray map is the same as it ever was, only it’s now hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).  OSGeo are also the folks behind the OpenLayers map system that powers the entire site, so please show your love on their Donations page.

The full-color geographical “world” map has been offline ever since NASA pulled the plug on their Blue Marble map server a few months back, but today it’s back courtesy of OpenGeo, another non-profit which, confusingly enough, is entirely separate from OSGeo.   If you haven’t seen this before, here’s how to activate it: click on the top right  icon, then choose “Base Layer > Geographical (OpenGeo)”, and the background of your OpenFlights map will now be the real world.  The two caveats are that 1) it’s considerably slower than the political map, since there’s so much more detail, and 2) OpenGeo’s map isn’t quite as high-res as the original, so you can’t zoom in all the way to the airport runways like you could previously.

Tiled and ready to go,
-j.

Facebook, in their grandmotherly kindness, has once again decided to break the OpenFlights Facebook application.  Today’s change is that the “profile box” we’ve come to know and love is going away on August 23, 2010:

And it will be replaced by the profile “application tab”, visible only if you browse to the user’s profile and click on the “OpenFlights” tab there:

To add the application tab to your profile, browse to http://apps.facebook.com/openflights, look for “Step 3: Click the button below to add the OpenFlights application tab to your Facebook profile”, click the button and follow the instructions.  Once done, you should have a new tab in your Profile, and the application should tell you “You have added the OpenFlights application tab to your profile” (you may need to reload the page once to see this).

While this is a hassle, the change is not all bad, since at least from now on we’ll have 520 pixels to play with (instead of the previous 184), so we’re open to suggestions to what we should do with our new real estate.  Something like the “Analyze” stats and charts, perhaps?  Alas, enabling a full-fledged “slippy map” like the OpenFlights.org website is still out of the question, as Facebook’s JavaScript support is far too crippled for the OpenLayers goodness we would need to implement it.

Losing face,
-jani

It’s only been a few weeks since we last pestered you, but it turns out our changes to the Facebook app weren’t quite enough, and that for a certain set of users flight notifications were still not working properly.  This time, though, we’re pretty sure we’ve got it licked, so let’s try this one last time — or so I hope.  Please go to:

http://apps.facebook.com/openflights/

If it says “Automatic refreshing active” at the bottom, the app should be working fine and no action is needed.  However, if it says “Step 1“, then please follow the instructions: click the link, grant the “publish” and “remember me” permissions, and then “Activate/Update preferences”.  You should get a “Thank you!” box after this, and then the application should finally work.  And if it doesn’t…  let us know!

<geek> Turns out that publish_stream isn’t enough, offline_access is required as well before Facebook will deign to grant a session key usable for offline stream publishing, and we were recording the wrong, temporary ones. Fortunately, we can request both and use the users_hasAppPermission() call to verify that the permission has duly been granted before recording the session key, and everything should now be peachy keen. </geek>

Facepalmed by Facebook,
-jani

Recent changes inside Facebook have broken the existing OpenFlights Facebook application‘s ability to  post recently added and/or today’s flights to your Facebook Wall.  To fix your copy, please go to this URL:

http://apps.facebook.com/openflights/

Right below “Step 1″, click on the link entitled “Grant permission to publish posts”, click on “Allow publishing” in the dialog that pops up, and then click one last time on “Update preferences”.  That’s it — and as a complimentary bonus, the flight map posted to your profile should now always be up to date.

Geek version: Effective today, Facebook has discontinued the old “template bundle” functionality, which used the offline_publish permission.  We’ve replaced it with stream publishing, but to work this requires the separate stream_publish permission instead.  In addition, we’re now calling fbml.refreshImgSrc after all profile changes to make sure the dynamically generated map is refreshed as well.

As always, the Facebook application code is available in the OpenFlights SVN, take a look if interested.  index.php is the core application, while updater.php is a standalone command line app that handles Wal updates.

Unbundled and streamlined,
-jani

Just a quick heads-up: OpenFlights now has well over 200,000 flights, but you’ll have to wait for 250,000 until the next installment of State of the Data.  With any luck, the quarter-million milestone may be reached before the end of the year.

The other news of note is that the NASA OnEarth (Hypercube) geographical world map layer, which was broken for a while, is back online.  To activate it, click on the top right  icon, then choose “Base Layer > Geographical (NASA)”, and the background of your OpenFlights map will now be the real world, not a light shade of beige.   Due to the richness of detail, the map is quite a bit slower than the default one, but it can be pretty gorgeous especially when zoomed in; take a look at the area around Nassau, Bahamas (NAS) if you don’t believe me!

Virtually exploring the world,
-jani