App Shopper: Sigacts (Reference)

App Activity

Jul 30 '10	New App: Free, v1.0

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Sigacts

iOS iPhone

This application is designed to allow Soldiers to quickly view significant activities on a battlefield. The Command Post of the Future (CPOF) is a brilliant system and all future applications are going to have to be able to pull data from the heart of the Army Battle Command Systems (ABCS). This app highlights the cornerstone of situation awareness and managing environments that are beset by information overload. We set out to create a simple, but powerful app. One that doesn’t try to do everything, but focuses on the crux of the struggle on the battlefield: visualizing events and activities. The app allows us to talk about the foundations of how we can better direct and manage information throughout the flattening hierarchy of command.

Features:
- Sigacts reads from an XML data source and quickly builds a dynamic view of the significant activities categorized by date. Sigacts presents a fully searchable mobile version of this information, allowing leaders on the go to gain situational awareness at the touch of a button, or swipe of a finger. Sigacts is location-aware, and presents a fully functional map based upon the user’s current selection. Sigacts is designed to connect to the upcoming Command Post of the Future API, allowing for real-time Significant Activity data to be sent to a mobile device over the air.
- Current version lists historical sigacts during D-Day in Normandy, France (over 50 sigacts): Note, D-Day was chosen to prevent the appearance that real, FOUO (or higher) data was being used. We started by creating dummy, but realistic data in a war zone, but since we knew that part of this competition required the data to go up to the Apple App store since it was an iPhone app, so we wanted to make something that was clearly unclassified, and we wanted to take another opportunity to remember the activities of our Grandfathers. Still, these 50 sigacts stand up on their own as a historical (if not thin) representation of the events of the summer of 1944.
- Fully searchable, dynamic search that searches and retrieves data from all of the fields present. As this app expands to more topics, the “searchability” will be the key to the success and power of the app.
- Builds views based on XML input, will fully take advantage of CPOF APIs with minimal additional development
- Google provided maps are fully functional, allowing users to zoom and move around the map. Future versions, though, will likely have to tie into a military version of the Google map server.