What is AirPort Location?


What is this application?

Airport Location is a small menubar app for Snow Leopard laptops and desktops. When you ask it to it records dozens of settings by taking a Snapshot of your computer just the way it is setup at that time. You can have as many Snapshots as you want – one for Travel, one for Office, one for Home, one for watching Movies etc.

What’s a Snapshot?

A Snapshot is like a picture – it records exactly how something ‘looks’ at a particular time. For instance, if you’re at work your desktop background is probably something low key, your volume is muted and your printer is setup to that one down the hall. When your computer is at work, it “looks” different then when it’s sitting on your lap at home, when your volume is up, iTunes is playing a great track, and the desktop background is a great pic of the family.

But a Snapshot is more than just “looks.” A snapshot records dozens of settings on your computer. Here are a few: brightness, volume, desktop background, firewall, hard drives, iChat status, dock items, iTunes playlist, open applications… The list goes on to include more than 50 different features! More Snapshot elements are being added with every release.

After recording several different Snapshots, Airport Location re-applies them on command!

When you’re working, Airport Location applies your “Work” snapshot… within seconds your computer is setup just like you want it at work. The same is true for any number of snapshots… Coffee Shops, Airports, Meetings, Watching Movies, A Friend’s House…. There is no limit to the number of different snapshots that you can have.

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Lion Compatibility & AL7 Development

 

A lot of AL users have been asking whether AL6 works with OSX Lion. Unfortunately, it does not. AL relies very heavily on notifications from the OS that networks have changed, or ethernet has come online, etc. Many of these notifications have changed in Lion, meaning that AL6 has to be completely re-worked in order to function. This is also true for many snapshot actions. Given the exciting progress I had made re-writing AL7 from the ground up, it makes most sense to devote myself to completing that. The other issue is that I have started a new and exciting job that is taking all of my free time. I am not able to develop at all.

AirPort Location was a very exciting learning experience, but it now is too big of an animal for me to tame in time for Lion. Hopefully I will be able to update AL in the future, but for now it will remain Snow Leopard only.

Thanks to everyone who has supported AirPort Location!

 

 

 

New Release … 0.60230


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Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed a large error with maps/address; now additional network traffic should stop for all machines
  • Re-added keyboard backlight to the snapshot list…
  • Added time been at a particular location
  • Fixed a bug that didn’t allow for time machine backups on hardware sets
  • Cleaned up some verbose logs
  • Various other bugfixes…

New Release … 0.60221

Download Most Recent Version

Bug Fixes:

  • Overhauled Address/Map detection methods to fix memory, network issues
  • Updated Adium status to account for fast computers.
  • Fixed a bug causing locations to not be properly deleted on some machines
  • Various bugfixes…

Academic Year Complete… Work on AL resumes!

It has been a long few months since I have had the time to work on AirPort Location, but now I finally have some time on my hands before summer plans start. I should be able to release a new version of AL6 soon, with several long-awaited bugfixes.

Thanks to everyone who continued to send reports!

Another update on delays…

Final examinations are consuming my time for the next two weeks. Until then, please keep sending reports and suggestions and I’ll do my best to queue them in order of receipt & importance.

I have some very exiting progress on AL7. I think that you all will enjoy it very much.

iPhone Data Tracker with Save File Dialog

I am sure that many of you have noticed today that iOS seems to record your location data. This is highly interesting to me, so I downloaded the source and modified it to output the parsed location data as a CSV file.

Here is my modified source

Here is a zip of the modified Application

Update on Progress…. Delays in Updates.

Hello all.

The semester is winding down and my scholastic commitments are ratcheting up. I have not had any time for the last month or so for work on AirPort Location 6 or 7, but by the middle of May I will have ample time once again. I am aware that there are a few issues plaguing AL6, and I am very appreciative of the submitted bug reports. Keep them coming!

Anyhow, I’ll respond to email questions, but work on AL6 & 7 has stopped for about another month until the school year finishes.

Apply AL Snapshots Immediately with Alfred

Personally, I’m not sure how OSX or Windows users can get along without a quick launch application. My personal favorites are Alfred for Mac and Launchy for Windows (although I haven’t regularly used Windows for about two years).
Besides finding files and launching apps my favorite features of these are customized queries with keywords. For instance to search IMDB for me, you’d type: imdb andrew freyer to find out that I’m not listed at all.

Alfred allows custom keyword searches too. By copying a search URL and adding the token {query}, you can use your application launcher to search any website you want. A little known feature of AirPort Location is that it responds to a request for the url al://Snapshot Name. When this URL is requested from any application, AirPort Location will immediately apply the named snapshot. For instance, this would apply your snapshot named Home:

Here’s how to use alfred to set this up:

  1. Open Alfred Preferences, and activate the “Features” section.
  2. Click “Custom Searches” on the left and click the “[+]” sign to add a custom search
  3. For the search URL: “al://{query}“, for the Display text: “Apply AirPort Location Snapshot…” for the keyword, “al

Using this method, you can launch any snapshot just from your keyboard using your favorite application launcher. You can launch your movies snapshot when you want to watch movies, or your working snapshot when you need to be distraction free.

New Release … 0.60212

Download Most Recent Version

Bug Fixes:

  • Fix for addresses with special characters not showing properly