Before there was an app, there were two machines. One was a KC-135, and later a B-1B — years spent as an Air Force Crew Chief, hands in the airframes that other people only ever see from the ground. The other was a locomotive cab, running trains as a certified conductor and engineer, reading signals and consist makeup for a living.
Most people who build plane-spotting or train-spotting apps are enthusiasts looking in from the outside. It Moves Co started from the inside — built by someone who's spent a career around the exact things these apps are about.
The apps started as a side project — something to build in the evenings, scratching a personal itch to log sightings properly instead of scribbling them in a notes app. Squawk1200 came first, for the plane-spotters. LocoTracker followed for the railfans. Overhead grew out of wanting to know what was actually passing overhead without digging through a cluttered flight-tracking site.
They're built the way someone who cares about this stuff would want them built — accurate about the details that matter, and honest about the ones that don't.
More apps are on the way, some for the same crowd of spotters and some aimed at a wider audience. All of them will carry the same idea forward: things that move, and the people who can't stop watching them.