Tracking Apple Devices using the ‘Find My iPhone’ feature in iOS 5 & OS X Lion
So I’ve been wanting to track my devices for years since I had a Macbook stolen from me a few years ago. I put together some cron jobs and logged ip information but this only goes so far. I know there are some commercial applications such as LoJack that do such things but I have lots of devices and that would be a bit costly. So when Apple recently updated OS X Lion & iOS 5 to push the ‘Find my iPhone’ functionality to the iCloud this basically is what I wanted for free. As good as the ‘Find my iPhone’ feature works it isn’t historical and is only a simply on-demand feature. This isn’t bad but I wanted more.
So after some searching there is a great API sosumi interface Tyler Hall reverse engineered the ‘Find my iPhone’ app so calls can be made on the fly. Tyler Hall has some great stuff here and includes some good examples but it isn’t quite collecting all the data that is there. So I expanded on his example and am polling all data and device info, and inserting it into a database. This needs to be taken a little further with a web interface front end but for now this is what I have. Read the README and you should be able to get this up and running on your LAMP system.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2011 at 11:55 am and is filed under OSS, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.