Compass in the mobile phone

Afraid to get lost among the skyscrapers of an impressive metropolis? Or maybe an incredible craving for nature brought you into the berry for berries of course mushrooms, also you get lost? Do not grieve. Our rubric "RTFM" together with digital information technologies is almost always ready to help you at a difficult moment. No, we will not use navigational aids in any way or learn to determine the course of the sides of the world along the Polar Star, just take on the conventional cell phone, which will act as a compass!

So, in order to see the phone in a new form, you will need to download a special Java-application, in which the Compass program tool from the Canadian programmer with a caressing rumor named Dana Christopher Mark Peters (Dana Christopher Mark Peters) will perform. The author extends his development completely freely, willingly laying out the source code of the program for everyone. Well, very honorable! Those who wish, to the place, can sponsor Dana for buying him a beer (apparently, in order to satisfy sadness-sadness). Do not take it for my ridiculous joke - the creator of "Compass" truly adores this sacred drink, which he confesses on the pages of his website.

Okay, enough about beer. Give a better look at the settings of this program. As it is also supposed, before the source of labor it is necessary to tell "Compass" about our geographical coordinates - longitude also latitude. To learn them it is authorized from any map of locality or an atlas, or having glanced on a site Astrolab.ru. Then specify the time zone for Greenwich also use the phone as a compass.

How to correctly determine the course of the world? Quite simply. We take a toothpick (or any suitable refined object), we put it to the center of the screen and keep it strictly perpendicular. Then rotate the phone in such a way that the shadow of the toothpick lies on the line, passing through the image of the sun on the screen (see screenshots). Combining the shadow is also a feature, we get the exact course of the sides of the world. Do not believe me? You can check on a real compass!

In addition, the program can calculate the altitude values ​​of the azimuths of the Sun also of the Moon, only similar in future versions will learn to illustrate the phase of a natural satellite of the Earth.

And also the final moment. Studying the "About" menu showed that in this program the domestic blood flows - at the heart of Compass is a mathematical apparatus developed by our compatriot from Moscow, Nikolay Klimchuk (Nikolay Klimchuk). Whatever you say, just nice.