Instead you grab your trusty phone, smart or not, and clap it to your ear. Over the air comes a soothing voice from Voxeo, calmly reading you the local tide information, straight from NOAA. That’s Moveable Tides, quick in and quick out, when you need it.
Moveable Tides is a slight variation on the Moveable Weather app I presented in my last blog post here. It shares the same design elements, and much of the same code, refactored now, to accept more variations on this theme. It taps into data coming from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and runs on the Google App Engine platform.
As was the case with Moveable Weather, the Tropo piece is easy to code. Just for fun, I’ve again set it up in a continuous loop, so an armchair sailor can check the tides all over the coastal US, simply by cruising around on an iGoogle page.
It’s worth it however, to massage the NOAA output a bit. There’s a standard routine, I call humanize_the_time, to make the times sound right. Also, here’s a bit of Python to cause the state abbreviations to be expanded. STATE_ABBREV is a Python dictionary of state names, along with their abbreviations.
m = re.match('.*([A-Z]{2}).*', place)
if m:
abbrev = m.group(1)
if abbrev in my_globals.STATE_ABBREV:
state = my_globals.STATE_ABBREV[abbrev]
place = place.replace(abbrev, state)
This code, along with the rest of the Moveable Weather project, can be found on my Google Code page, along with documentation. You can also head on over to the Moveable Weather web page, to try it out. I hope it inspires you to create your own location-based mashup with Google Latitude, and Tropo.
As part of last weekend’s 
Our commitment to free development has always included US phone numbers and no-cost phone calls to any number in the United States. Today we’re expanding that support to the international community.
Tropo’s goal is to make it easy for developers to create, test and deploy voice, SMS, and instant messaging applications no matter where you live. Now you can build a truly global communications application. And until you move to production, it won’t cost you a dime.
