That's right, Homeland Alert will display a little color-coded ball in the menu bar indicating the current threat level:
Unfortunately, the government has not set up any kind of automated way of checking this information. After I had installed the app I started poking around to see where the info came from and found that there was a difference between the "yellow" I was getting from the app, and the "orange" being reported by the White House Homeland Security site.
I emailed the author of Homeland Alert, who responded that the Attny General just announced a lowered threat level and he has updated the app accordingly. (it just checks a little CGI on the exittoshell.com site)
So, this raises a few issues... first, it'd be nice if they could update the whitehouse.gov site to reflect the current status. It still hasn't been updated (as of around 1:15p), although it does say that it was last updated Sept. 24th (today).
And, how hard would it be for them to have a page that just says "yellow", not to mention a SOAP or XML-RPC interface? How many billions are they pumping into homeland defense and they can't even pay a college intern $20 to set it up?
OK, even though this whole threat level scheme is essentially useless
and was probably only designed for the PR uses... I still think it's a
fun app...
