
TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – I’m back with another edition of a macOS application after a break of some seven weeks. During this break, as usual, I watched a lot of crime dramatization stories from Crime Watch Daily and Paula Zahn’s On the Case. Crime Watch Daily often discusses a case where investigators put things together, plotting the locations of cellular towers on the map, which made me think to myself “Hmm… Could I build a desktop application to make a map like that?” So here it comes. A desktop application that I submitted to Mac App Store just 10 minutes ago is called Tower Points.
Tower points is a desktop application that lets you visually document a case (a murder case, a stalking case, a series of burglaries in the same neighbor…) with positions of cellular towers and objects. Erect dozens of tower pins on the map based on their geo-coordinates. Place an object (body, car, blood, DNA, gun, knife, money…) at the spot where you click on the map. You can measure the distance between two objects you select or between an object and a tower you select. You want to draw a 5-mile-radius circle around a dead body? That’s a piece of cake. Actually, what you can do is document a case by placing tower pins and objects on the map and visit the actual scene with an iOS device since you can share map data with an iPhone and an iPad through iCloud Drive. Continue reading →