New MilSyms app
Saab Australia has released MilSyms, an app for learning the 2525 common warfighting symbol set the military uses for planning and tracking battle movements on modern situational awareness and combat system displays.
In military and tactical situations this standard symbology is used on maps to replicate objects like aircraft, tanks, naval assets and whether they are friendly, hostile or neutral.
The symbology set is also robust enough to be used in mapping emergency management situations or facility operations.
Supporting 4,000 symbols, the MilSyms app is designed to help people quickly identify these symbols with a symbol browser, reference library and time test challenges.
Saab Australia Software Architect, Jeremy Graham developed the MilSyms concept demonstrator which was then pitched to the University of South Australia’s School of Information Technology & Mathematical Sciences as a student development project.
“We have a fairly established relationship with all Adelaide’s universities, recruiting a number of engineering students each year,” said Andrew McCauley, Saab Australia Project Manager.
“So we put out an app development challenge to engineering students, to give them real-world experience which we backed up with professional support and mentoring.”
Jeremy guided the development with a successive group of students over three stages — prototyping, pre-release and full release.
Daniel Furnell was one of the first students to work on the first MilSyms prototype and says working on the project gave him a “lucky break”.
“The prototype I developed with Jeremy’s support went really well and initiated a job offer from Saab,” Daniel said.
Now a Graduate Engineer with Saab Australia, Daniel saw the app through to the full release and is leading the development of an iOS version prototype with another group of students.
This first release is for Android devices and the iOS version is due for release later this year.