License plates

Research car license plate combinations on your iPhone or iPod touch

Be warned: LPlates is untested on firmware 1.1.3!! It may work in its basic functionality, but some features may not perform well or crash the application.
I don’t recommend you to use 1.1.3 at the moment!

Overview

In some countries (mainly european), the license plates on vehicles show the city or region where the car or motorcycle is registered (see WP for german and austrian system). This information is coded in some letters and as there are many combinations it’s not so easy to remember.
License plates is a native application for the iPhone and the iPod touch that contains all valid license plate abbreviations used in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Norway, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland (more to come), so you can easily look up where a car is registered — even when you’re on the road.

Prerequisites

As you have to install License plates on your iPhone or Touch, it is necessary that you are able to put custom applications on it. Apple does not support that kind of improvements by default (by now) – so you have to ‘jailbreak’ your device to get full access to it.
I won’t explain what you have to do for it at this point — but you will find tons of helpful information about that topic by asking Google etc.

Screenshots

Functions

• Data from Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Norway, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland (more countries to come)
• Information about the district or city a license plate belongs to – including the state
• Search for any license code
• Select countries to be shown in summary
• Show results in Maps
• Online update: receive the newest database without reinstalling a new version of the application

ChangeLog

• v0.3.1
  • fixed wrong version number in About view
• v0.3
  • fixed some memory leaks *sigh*
  • Select countries you want to be shown in summary
  • enhanced updater
  • added Czech license plates data (thx Micha!)
  • added Norwegian license plates data
  • added Polish license plates data (thx Micha!)
  • added Slovakian license plates data
• v0.2
  • changed name in SpringBoard to “LPlates” (as License Plates was fairly long to display)
  • added search function
• v0.1
  • initial release

Download & installation

LPlates can be installed from Installer.app, it is located in the community sources and filed under ‘Misc’.
To install it manually, download the zip-file, extract it and put in in your /Applications/-folder on your iPhone or Touch (don’t rename the application as it won’t work). Make sure the application is set “executable” before starting it (should already be if you don’t mess up it while extracting). After reloading your springboard you should see the app as “LPlates”.
(If you upgrade from v0.1 make sure you delete the old “LicensePlates”-Folder, otherwise you will see the app twice )

License Plates v0.3.1 – licenseplates_031.zip

I assume no liability if you break your device while installing or using License Plates — so use it at your own risk!!

Contribute

You have information about the license plate system in your country and it fits into the scheme used in LPlates? Please contact me!

Donation

If you like my little app and find it useful it would give me a great pleasure if you would donate a small amount. Thank you very much!

Source code

See http://code.google.com/p/lplates/ for SVN checkout.

My main goal with this app was to gain experience in native iPhone programming, so don’t except it to be perfect by now .

Leave comments if you have problems or want to give me a short report.
Have fun!