BlåBlink

What is happening now, nearest first

The front page is a timeline: what has happened over the last few hours, with category, place and how far away it is from you. A fire in Struer 106 km away carries its distance, so you can see at once whether it is your own town or news from the other end of the country.

The chips at the top switch the categories on and off — traffic, fire, police, helicopter, power, weather — and 'near me' cuts away everything outside your radius.

The list is a list, not a news feed. Police reports appear as headline and time with a link to the police's own page; the body text is fetched only when you open the item, and never stored.

• Sorted by time, with a distance on every event
• Categories can be switched off individually
• A radius around your position that you set yourself
• Routine tasks from the fire services are hidden by default

The whole country on one map

The map shows every event at once and lets you step back in time: the last hour, six hours, a day or two. The counter at the bottom says how many there are of each kind in the chosen window — here 115 traffic events, 103 fire and rescue call-outs, 13 police reports and two helicopters in the air.

The map is locked to Denmark, because the sources are Danish. Press the location button and it jumps to your own position rather than guessing.

What the report actually says

Open an event and it stands as the source wrote it: what happened, where, when, and what is expected next. A road closure carries both the reason — 'police operation, the road is closed' — and when the road is expected to reopen.

A power cut says how many customers are without power and which utility reported it. And then it does something the feed does not: it says the location is approximate. The circle on the map is the network area the utility reported down, not an address — so it is drawn as a circle and explained in words, rather than shown as a pin that lies about its precision.

At the bottom the source stands with name and link, every single time. That is not decoration: ODIN's 112 pulse may only be reproduced with clear attribution, and the condition has to be met on every event — not once in a colophon.

The air ambulance, followed live

Denmark's five air ambulances broadcast their position over the radio like any other aircraft. BlåBlink listens in through a free ADS-B network and shows them on the map when they are airborne.

The helicopters' tail numbers have been looked up and verified one by one, so it is the right machines being followed and not passing air traffic. If one is airborne it enters the list as an event alongside the others, with its home base noted.

The detail carries the attribution — adsb.lol — and beneath it the sentence the whole app stands on: BlåBlink is an unofficial app with no connection to the police, the emergency services or the road authority. Call 1-1-2 if life is in danger.

Emergency numbers, also without a network

A tab with the numbers you need when something is wrong: 112 at the top in red, and below it 114 for the police when it is not urgent, victim support, the domestic violence line, the four regional out-of-hours doctors, the poison line and the gas and electricity utilities.

The list lives in the app and needs no connection. That is deliberate: it has to work in a basement, in a tunnel and on a phone with no data.

You decide what disturbs you

Radius and position are set in one place, and the app says how many events fall inside it. Every source can be switched off on its own — if you only want fire and rescue, you turn the other five off.

The fire services' routine tasks — incident commander inspections and enquiries — are hidden by default. They are not call-outs, and in a sample they filled every fifth slot in the feed.

Notifications can be enabled per source. The app has no server to push messages out; it fetches in the background itself, which is why the app also says that a message may arrive late. Better to say so than to promise otherwise.

The archive holds around three months of events and can be searched — including when you cannot remember the spelling.