A New Look For the TRMNL Flight Tracker
Now that a TRMNL X device is finally in our hands, the flight tracker plugin deserved a redesign that better utilized the extra screen real-estate afforded.
The most notable change is the update to the progress tracker from a solid bar, to an arc with solid and dotted line segments representing distance traveled and remaining respectively.
The update was mainly performed via Claude by hand-sketching an update, and giving the LLM parameters of the TRMNL X device screen size, while also asking it to respect the original screen size of the original TRMNL device. While moving the flight metadata information to their own miniature tiles was straight forward, the largest work that was performed by the LLM was figuring out the math behind the progress arc, and dynamically changing the angle of the airplane SVG based on its progress on the flight while ALSO, respecting different screen sizes.
Suffice to say, this is one of the few times where blindly trusting what the AI spat out for this update was worth it. Please, do not ask on how the math was done, the answer is simple: we don’t know.
In other news, the flight tracker plugin has now surpassed 140+ installations. We’re working on API stability when infrastructure updates occur, unrelated to the API service itself, next.
