chris moos’s blog

MoosTrax is now almost out of beta, which means registrations will be open to all. Also, the site has been redesigned to have a cleaner look. The new site will be available soon, check out a preview here:

You can now access a smaller, stripped down version of the MoosTrax site on your mobile phone by visiting http://m.moostrax.com. Currently only live tracking is supported.

You can now have your location sent from MoosTrax to Yahoo Fire Eagle.

“Fire Eagle is a site that stores information about your location. With your permission, other services and devices can either update that information or access it. By helping applications respond to your location, Fire Eagle is designed to make the world around you more interesting! Use your location to power friend-finders, games, local information services, blog badges and stuff like that…”

If you have a MoosTrax account all you need to do is login at http://fireeagle.moostrax.com and link to your Yahoo account. You can then choose a device to use for sending to Fire Eagle…that’s it.

Enjoy.

You can now access MoosTrax with Ruby.

Install the gem

$ wget http://www.moostrax.com/static/MoosTrax-0.1.gem
$ sudo gem install MoosTrax-0.1.gem

Try out this demo script

make sure to fill your API_KEY in.

require 'rubygems'
require 'moostrax'
require 'time'
 
def get_local_date(date_str)
    Time.parse(date_str + ' UTC').getlocal.asctime
end
 
mt = MoosTrax.new('API_KEY')
 
begin
    devices = mt.devices
    devices.each do |device|
        info = mt.device_info(device)
        puts "Device ID: #{info['device_id']}\n"
        puts "Device Name: #{info['device_name']}\n"
        puts "Last Contact: #{get_local_date(info['last_contact'])}\n"
        puts "Date Added: #{get_local_date(info['date_added'])}\n"
 
        location = mt.location(device)
 
        puts "Most Recent Location: #{location['latitude']}, #{location['longitude']} #{get_local_date(location['date'])}\r\n"
 
        history = mt.history(device, Time.now-86400, Time.now)
        puts "Number of location updates in past 24 hours: #{history.length}\r\n"
 
        puts "First Location in History: #{history[0]['latitude']}, #{history[0]['longitude']}\r\n" if history.length >=1
 
        puts '------------------------------------------------------'
    end
 
rescue MoosTrax::APIError => e
    puts "Unable to access MoosTrax: #{e.message}"
end

For more information, check out the Developer API Wiki.

I’m just now finishing up a wordpress plugin for MoosTrax. It allows you to specify your API key from your MoosTrax account and then display a widget on your sidebar with your current location. You can see it in action on the sidebar of this blog. Check out the screenshot: