What's really missing here, if you want to do this right, is a way to have the application run in the background with GPS active. Then I could get alerted to missing children who have been abducted close to where I am.
Unfortunately the SDK doesn't allow backgrounding, but for the 1.7 million users running Cydia, they can install Backgrounder to keep AMBER Alert running in the background. It has a built-in background checking utility so that it will vibrate and set a badge if you're, say, looking at one of the other pages in the application. If you background the app with Backgrounder, this mechanism continues to run as well, providing notifications every 30 minutes.
No. The iPhone cannot currently do anything like that. There was an early preview talk about a background push framework at Apple's WWDC in June 2008, but still hasn't been made real yet.
I appreciate the app author's desire to create something that can enhance the AMBER alert system, I think that this app will be useless until the iPhone supports background processing.
Yeah, and more importantly, can't you just sign up your phone (you know, with a phone number) for TXT or SMS alerts from the AMBER ALERT folks? I'm certain some of my family members have gotten AMBER ALERT TXTs before.
And then, you know, since your phone has internet access you could just pull up their webpage or local news through safari.
You can. But the user must keep the app running, i.e. cannot switch to another app or go to the homescreen. Switching off the screen (the power button), or answer (not initiating) phone calls is OK. Which is kind of a big limitation. But really has been OK for millions of users so far...
