Proposal for EBT API additions for mobile apps

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followtheloot
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Proposal for EBT API additions for mobile apps

Post by followtheloot »

I love that EuroBillTracker has an API for entering notes from external apps. I propose an addition to the API to make it more mobile device app friendly:

1) Add the ability to enter GPS coordinates instead of City/Country/Zip. Most mobile phones have GPS built in, and it gives you a more accurate read than City/Country/Zip for tracking.
2) Make the printer code optional. The serial number is easily readable

The reason I ask is that I'm getting ready to release an iPhone app that can very accurately scan a EURO serial number (as well as a number of other currencies) in less than a second (depending on your iphone) and then its just a matter of selecting the denomination and you've got yourself a uniquely trackable bill in just a few seconds. I'd love to allow users to enter their eurobilltracker information and have the bills automatically be entered into this site, but forcing them to try to find, read and input the tiny printer code would lengthen that time considerably. If we make the entering of bills quicker and mostly painless, I think it would go a long ways to encouraging new people to enter their bills, and doesn't force them to try to recall where it is they received or released the bills.

While there are gps -> city/country/zip databases out there, I haven't seen any complete ones that are free, and since I'm going to release the app for free, I can't pay for the databases.

I realize there's a EuroApp iPhone application already, but it just crashes on my iPhone so I'm unaware of its capabilities.
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lmviterbo
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Re: Proposal for EBT API additions for mobile apps

Post by lmviterbo »

As avij told you, "there is currently no way to enter notes by coordinates alone." At the moment, the Development Team doesn't have the needed staff to implement this feature.

I guess the same applies to skipping the printer code when registering a note. I am not in the Development Team but I also wish entering the serial number and denomination (= value) was enough. If, and only if, EBT has reasons to completely trust the reliability of a serial number scanner app, maybe it's possible for the Team to start thinking about this.

Back to converting GPS to address: you may want to use this GPS-coordinates API for example. It's far from perfect but I guess it's not that bad either.
followtheloot
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Re: Proposal for EBT API additions for mobile apps

Post by followtheloot »

Well, not to advertise here, but if the development team (or whoever makes the decisions) want to see a very late beta of the app, I wouldn't mind sending it to them so they can test the accuracy of the scanner if that helps. I'd really like to add to your database rather then splitting the hits up.
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