Start Simple

I'm all about voice-based applications, and I'm frankly, a Google fan boy. Add in the fact that I live by the coast, and I love to body surf with my family, and venture out in our small outboard motor boat, and it's pretty natural that I came up with the idea of tidespot.com

I wanted to keep it simple, and not rely on any particular mobile device, or set of advanced features. The more I thought about it, and started playing around with the code, the more I was taken with the idea of location-based apps that don't use GPS.

So I hit upon the idea of working from the zip code, which for the purposes of tide reporting, seems to be plenty accurate.

I pass the zip code to Google's geocoder, which give me a latitude and longitude. Armed with this I find the closest match, from a pool of about 260 NOAA tide reporting stations. Then it's just a matter of looking up the tide information in the appropriate table, hosted by NOAA.

I'll make that obligatory observation that this is a work in progress, and it is. I'd love to get your feedback.