Mega filter is here: filter by (almost) anything!
 

Today's feature is the new mega filter. There's now a "More..." button below your familiar filter box, which contains these values:

• Class -- class of service (economy, business, first)
• Distance < & > -- try eg. "Distance > 1000 mi" to remove short-hauls from cluttering up your map
• Note -- search the notes you've added for words ("delay", "stopover", etc)
• Reason -- reason for flight (business, leisure, crew, other)
• Registration -- plane registration, can be full (AB-CDE) or partial (AB)

These can all be combined with the existing trip/airline/year filters and are active through "Top 10" and "Analyze", so now you can check eg. how many miles you flew for work in 2008, or how many flights you've done in Singapore Airlines First class, etc.

And one more small but handy addition: the Trip filter now has a "Not in a trip" option, which shows all flights that are not assigned to a trip.

If all goes according to plan, OpenFlights will finally be "hard" launched sometime next week. If you want to give me the best possible Christmas present, then find me a bug before then :D

So can I import my flights from My Premium PDF from FM?

Not at this time, this would require reverse engineering their PDF format. :td:

What you can do, though, is save the individual web pages containing your FM flight data and then import those one at a time.

Public launch!
 

OpenFlights was "officially" launched yesterday, and there's a new blog to celebrate:

http://openflights.org/blog/

The news of the day is the introduction of the Elite level system, a name chosen to appeal to frequent flyers. :p Basically, users who contribute to the site monetarily or otherwise are rewarded with Silver/Gold/Platinum status, which gets them spiffy stars :-: in their public profiles and extra perks like being able to turn off banner ads and password-protecting private profiles. Those bad boys who punch in lots of flights or set their profiles to private, on the other hand, are reminded about their naughty ways when logging in and get a warning icon on their profiles.

So my next question is, where next? What direction should OF go from here? Let me know ^

Kewl!

Next: Facebook widget! :)

On the to-do list already! I'd like to not only share the stats like That Other Site's widget does, but also post new flights into the Facebook newsfeed -- only if the user wants them, of course, and with heavy filtering to prevent excessive spew.

Along the same lines would be adding Facebook Connect to OpenFlights, so you can use the same username/password on both.

Oooo, sooo cool! :)

"List flights" broken?
 

Whenever I click "List flights" I get the "Loading" circle graphic, but nothing happens (for a few minutes at least). This happens on Chrome, Firefox 3, and IE 7 (all on XP). My username is the same as my FlyerTalk username.

And another bug: In Chrome, if you enter your username and password in the boxes and hit [Enter], the address bar becomes:
"http://openflights.org/?name=USERNAME&pw=PASSWORD"
(with USERNAME and PASSWORD being the actual username and password). This action works as expected in Firefox 3, and results in a error sound in IE7.

Fixed -- line feeds/carriage returns in your FlightMemory "notes" were messing up things.

Oo, this is a whole cluster of bugs... :o

First, pressing "Enter" in forms is not standardized/supported and different browsers will do things differently. (Pressing TAB after you enter your password, on the other hand, will log you in.) Apparently Chrome puts the form contents (name & pw) in the address bar and tries to send it as a GET... :confused:

The second and bigger bug, though, is that the password should never be sent in the clear. I've now fixed this(*), so that the password is never sent in the clear anywhere, and even an evil eavesdropper can't re-use the hashed login string because it changes every time.

(*) For fluent speakers of Geek: OF now implements challenge-handshake authentication, so the server sends a random key, and the client (your browser) sends back an MD5 hash of the key, name and password. This is compared to the precomputed MD5 hash of name/password in the DB, and the user allowed in only if md5(challenge + user_hash) == md5(challenge + db_hash).

Thanks for the bug reports ^

Thanks for giving us beta testers Gold Elite, Jani! I plan to pitch in a little bit when I can :)

OpenFlights application now on Facebook
 

Ask and ye shall receive:

http://apps.facebook.com/openflights

As promised, it adds a box full of stats to your Facebook profile, and (if you let it) updates your feed automatically whenever you add flights.

Thanks! I joined already :)

Time flies like an arrow
 

Why yes, it would! This took a completely disproportionate amount of time to implement, since building those fields "properly" meant adding timezone and daylight savings time date for every airport on the planet, but the code is there now and so is most of the data. More details on the blog:

http://openflights.org/blog/2009/02/...like-an-arrow/

Support for time parsing has also been added to the FlightMemory importer as well as the native CSV import/export format. Please let me know ASAP if you find any problems, since the backend changes needed for this were quite extensive and the logic to keep date, departure time, arrival time, duration and distance in sync is hairy to say the least (cf. Help: Time). In particular, while the broad strokes of DST are there now, help is still needed for working out those bits of the US, Canada and Australia where DST is not observed.

Give your flights a spin in 3D on Google Earth
 

Feature of the day: OpenFlights now supports 3D mapping through Google Earth! :cool: Check out a screenshot:

(small) (large)

Just export your flights as KML and load the result into Google Earth, or any other visualization program that supports KML, and you'll get an interactive 3D flight map. More about it on the blog:

Give your flights a spin in 3D on Google Earth

^ Very cool!