emergency alerts

**joe142** · 04-10-2009, 03:25 PM

Hi I'm a firefighter and I know a few other firemen that have the g1. It would be great if there was an app that would alert us that there was a fire call in our area.

**Jorsher** · 04-10-2009, 03:27 PM

That would be pretty neat

You'd think the weather channel app would give you weather alerts too... Hmmmmm...

We just had a tornado a mile or so from here. I could hear the tornado sirens, but they are usually something you can ignore for the most part. I went to my car to smoke since it was raining, and the rain sounded rather "big." Next thing I know, pea sized hail, then dime sized, then quarter sized. At this point I decided to go back in the building, and we ended up with golf-ball sized hail. Hope my car is OK

That would be a nice app though and I don't think it'd be too difficult to do. Could be something as simple as setting up "groups" that you can mass SMS.

**simplyTravis** · 04-10-2009, 04:06 PM

Weatherbug gives you local weather alerts and it has a persistent icon which is great! Although, sometimes it will have the "boy who cried wolf" effect where it will give me the lakewind advisory and possible canal flooding a few towns over (it gives it by counties which are pretty large out here in Texas) so I sometimes won't check when we have a thunderstorm warning.

Fire alerts could probably worked out (I know they have an amber alert app) but it would require you going to the person announcing it I guess.

**joe142** · 04-12-2009, 08:38 AM

yea it would be good. how could u start an app like that?

**ickyfehmleh** · 04-12-2009, 01:17 PM

Originally Posted by joe142

yea it would be good. how could u start an app like that?

Find out how the fires are "announced". If there's an RSS feed or some sort of XML feed, all the better (insofar as data acquisition, not so much with the burning part). Write an app to monitor that URL, parse the output, and see if any listed location is "nearby". You can use the G1's GPS sensor to determine the user's present location and use some math (eg each degree of latitude is ~69.046767 miles) to build a radius of the user's search area. If the announced fire is within the user's radius, pop up a MapView with the fire's location selected as the destination and give the user directions on how to reach it.