Saturday, August 29, 2009

Done

Geopher Lite 1.1 has been submitted to apple for approval.

Thanks for being patient with me everyone. Hopefully it was voluntary patience and not too forced. =)

Here are the update notes, broken down a bit for more detail than what you'll see in the store:
- Added in-app map support. This has a pretty straightforward interface, with a button to go to your current location as well as a button which shows the target location. The target location button will alternate between zooming out to show both points and centering the map on the target position. There's room here to have it zoom in as well, but I didn't get that far and that's minor. Maybe later.
- Added 3GS compass support. I actually fixed a couple rare case bugs with the compass system due to looking at this for so long. 3G compass support is unfortunately going to remain the same. Let me know if the filtering is too extreme. Usually it's been OK for me but indoors or under heavy cover it's pretty bad. I've got a 3GS now so this likely won't change unless one fo you guys gets involved. =)
- Added a few preferences. These include magnetic or true north (effects the 3GS compass only) and an option to continue to use google maps for mapping as opposed to the in-app mapping support.

- Bug with coordinate saving fixed. This was caused by the waypoint field being less than 5 characters.
- local preferences crash issue. This was caused by things happening sometimes out of order when the application quits. Also a potential cause of coordinates not being saved.
- Fixed a problem with URL linking not behaving quite correctly. I'm not sure if anyone is even using this right now, but it now works a bit cleaner. I probably won't touch this again unless there's good reason to do so since it's such a niche feature.
- Cleaned up the FAQ/Help quite a bit.

Future improvements that I have in mind, which are things I'd like to get around to, but are not pressing include:
- allowing for a download of a LOC/GPX from the geocaching.com webpage. I'm a html n00b so I'm not sure what to tweak to get the UIWebView to support capturing the download. It simply doesn't give any feedback last time I checked so I'd have to go spelunking in apple's private API to try and figure that out. Not something I'm terribly comfortable with. Well, I do have the option of writing my own web browser from scratch, but I'm not looking forward to that either.
- fixing the zoom on the target button (and possibly the current location button) to be more automatic. This means zooming in and out a bit better in some circumstances. Someday if I can ever think of a way to add GPX support short of writing my own email client, it would be nice to add saved geocaches in this space.
- web page archiving. I have preliminary support for this, but it looks kind of bad because it doesn't save the entire page, just the text. This would be a bit time consuming, but be great to have around for general purpose stuff.
- Better skins. I keep thinking I need to revisit my default purple arrow and maybe the default compass as well to help things look a bit nicer. I did this once and actually made a couple things look worse. Is hould get a real artist to help. I'd also like to do a bar style compass as well as a better outdoor black and white compass view.

I'll post again once we are approved. Thanks for using Geopher Lite!

1 comment:

mjm2050 said...

Sounds like great work - can't wait to try it out!

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DadGuy has been working with apple computers since the mac classic. I love games and puzzles and like to solve problems. I'm having a blast developing for the iPhone and iPad.