App Idea: WiFiFighter

So I’m a sixteen hour flight from home, our pre-honeymoon, just scored some me time which I’d normally use to smoke but since I agreed to stop that and since I’ve found some wifi love I’ll instead use it to pitch an app idea to you devs, one inspired by this trip.

Not easy when your overseas to stay connected relying on wifi (though perhaps that’s the point I’m missing about honeymoons). What doesn’t help is that a lot of hotspots you see listed on your phone without a padlock as you walk around and jump onto in desperation to sync up email and rss don’t lead you to the Internet but to some stupid sign-up thing. Man I hate that.

Being alerted of open networks isn’t too helpful as maybe one in ten are good, but what would help is an app that hopped onto every open network and attempted to verify, perhaps with some http get requests to a handful of ports on a host intended for this purpose, that the hotspot is legit, notifying you, taking a note of it itself (maybe wardriving style), and attempt to kickstart syncs of your various clients.

I’m aware that’s not the most secure-sounding digital behavior in the world to facilitate but I’m desperate and would pay maybe fifteen bucks for such a thing right now.

So there’s the good and potentially unique yet not too hard to program concept, there’s a good app name with a matching currently available dot com to it brought to you by a guy also offering his server both to host any website you want to cook up for the thing and to offer whatever would be necessary to get such an app to confirm it’s in fact on the net.

Good idea for any platform but if one of you manages to crank it out for Android in the next several days, you got fifteen bucks (minus Google’s cut) waiting for you from at least one person.

She should be finishing up her spa thing shortly so that’s a wrap for my me time; gonna put the phone down and transition into jacuzzi time. Rub a dub in the hot tub. Let’s see how waterproof these Nicorette patches are.

Doug Simmons