Back!

OK, I'm back from vacation and getting going again on this update. I'm hoping for a submittal by friday. If I can't get the compass rotation on the 3G right then I may submit an update that only includes the map. I'd like to have it all together, but I don't want to make you all wait too long if I can help it.

Thanks for stopping by.

Delay

No good way to say this -- the release isn't ready. I've done some testing and while I've found a bug, and fixed it, with the map view (and I think it's pretty solid now) the compass rotation isn't cooperating.

I had a chance to borrow a friend's 3GS for an hour or so and play around with some things friday. The compass rotates with some tweaking, but it's not accurate like I'd expect and acts differently than the built-in compass app that apple has. I'll have to do a little messing around with that. Unfortunately having my own 3GS is about a month away, unless someone wants to give me $200 to get around waiting for AT&T to let be be upgrade eligible. =) That's not going to stop the update from happening, but it's proven to be my biggest hindrance so far. Having a device to test the code on is extremely valuable.

I'm still considering the settings in the main bundle and I've even looked at some coding here. I'm still not sure I'll finish that off, most people don't seem to mind where they are once they know about them. There's already a section in the help menu about where the preferences are, I'll have to at least update the help to have that be closer to the top.

As always, I'm open to suggestions and criticism, thanks for stopping by!

Map finished

Google maps are now inside of Geopher Lite basically as you see it below, replacing the current "map" button on the set target screen. The differences being that the tooltips have good information, the current location dot is blue and as you'd expect, and the coordinate text at the bottom is centered instead of right justified.



I found and fixed the semi-random coordinate saving bug. One workaround until I get the next update is to enter something into the waypoint location on teh target screen -- this will force an immediate save of the coordinates once you leave this text field. Honestly I'm shocked that I haven't had more people report this as it would only sometimes save coordinates unless you entered in the GC tag, which would then force the coordinates to save. I had 4 people over the last 6 months report coordinates not saving and it's been a bug since the last revision. All of those people I gave a few suggestions to try and I'm assuming they never got it working but just didn't tell me. Please, if you see a problem let me know so I can fix it! I can't fix what I don't know about. =)

I'm going to take a good hard look at the compass next and see if I can get that working a bit better. For starters I'd like to either fix up or outright remove the filtering if I can, using apple's built-in API for the compass. I'd also like to turn on the rotation by default. I'm seriously considering keeping the rotation on at all times for the compass view. I don't think this view gets used as much as I had planned originally, and as it's currently defaulted to off, I think many people don't even turn it on and think it's just broken.

I'd like to submit an update by this weekend, we will see how much time I get to work on the compass. I'm considering a delay on the project to move the settings into the app itself, and that certainly won't happen this week. I'll let you know by the end of the week if I go that far or not. =)

Thanks for dropping by.

Screenshots!

So I did some looking into the map view this evening. To get a google map embedded within a view is stupid easy. Pins and such are apparently another story. I can't seem to get the pins to be anything but red, I'm probably missing something obvious.

Here are some screenshots of my sample mock-up program I'm using to play around with the map settings.





The target and circle buttons will center you on your current location or your target, respectively. Back will take you back to the target entry screen. Type will cycle through the 3 types of maps -- map, satellite, and hybrid. I need to make a note to allow setting the default type in the preferences.

I should note that a few nights ago I was able to finally reproduce coordinates not saving. Assuming I can pin down the problem (since it seems random), I should have that fixed with the next release as well.

Forward

It's an interesting time of year for me. Last year at this time I was frantically trying to get my first revision of Geopher Lite to apple to try and make the initial app store deadline. I missed it by two days, delaying my app for what seemed like ages after the actual app store opened.

Later, Apple had me take out some features that seemed to be no brainers, due to the fact that the app acted too much like a web browser. Groundspeak was also contacting me (actually asking me to pull my app) shortly thereafter. While I was on vacation.

Fun times.

This year I hope that July goes a bit more smoothly. I'm again going on vacation in the later part of the month and plan to have the next update to Geopher Lite submitted to apple before I leave. I'm fairly close on the compass code, I just need the guy at work with the 3GS to let me borrow his phone for a few hours to do some testing and debugging with it. Wish me luck. =)

I've not done a lot with the google maps API, but I expect that to be fairly straightforward as well. It will be nice to have that feature embedded in the app itself without closing things down and heading off to another application.

I'm toying with the idea of revamping the settings and moving them within the app itself. I'd like to also finish off the process by turning the compass rotation on by default, possibly just removing the option entirely to keep it off. Opinions and concerns are welcome here.

I'll keep you guys updated. As always thanks for using Geopher Lite!