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!

News!

First off, my apologies for the dearth of news. I've been busy, distracted and out of sorts lately. But I'm back. And I didn't forget about you guys, despite the lack of updates.

A couple of weeks ago I made the decision to not release an update until I had the compass rotation working properly. It didn't feel right to release a 3.0 update without better compass support. My apologies for the delay, especially for those who are waiting for the coordinate saving bug fix. I know it's annoying and less than ideal.

I've been struggling with the compass rotation for an embarassing amount of time. I didn't have a 3GS until a few days ago, so I wasn't able to do a lot of actual testing. The little that I did get to do, the compass worked quite incorrectly. Sure the compass spun, but it didn't spin where I expected or where I wanted to go.

So I took today off of work and decided to make it my goal to get the compass working today. It's working. And the code has been updated in the SVN repository for those of you following along at home. Assuming anyone is.

For you aspiring developers out there, I want to let you in on a little CLLocation secret. When the description of a property says this:

"The value in this property represents the heading that points toward the magnetic North Pole, which is different than the geographic North Pole. The value in this property is always measured relative to the top of the device, regardless of the device’s physical or interface orientation. The value 0 represents magnetic North, 90 represents magnetic East, 180 represents magnetic South, and so on. The value in this property should always be valid."

This paragraph means that the heading 0 is NOT relative to the top of the screen, which I incorrectly understood, but that 0 is always relative to the direction that is NORTH. Or magnetic north in this example. Big difference. Hopefully you can see how I misunderstood this information with the example above. I'll have to send a note to apple about that.

So what does that mean to you guys? Well, long story short, I've spent a number of of evenings and a half a day today trying to figure out why my compass wasn't working. Well, unbeknownst to me, it WAS working... assuming that 0 was the top of the iPhone regardless of where it was pointing. Which is not the case. I simply had to do some correctional math and viola... working compass!

I feel kind of dumb now.

But here I am hoping that sharing my folly with the world does some good for someone. =)

So, that out of the way, I still have one problem to tackle relative to getting the release out. I thought I had the map view completely working but the titlebar is now showing up funny. Funny as in there are two that are overlapping improperly. I suspect this is due to the new SDK I am using with snow leopard, but it's difficult to say for sure.

On a side note, I've not seen a ton of snow leopard so far, but what I have seen I like! For $29 it's worth the upgrade price, if nothing else for the wake/sleep speedup times on my laptop. =)

Anyway. Once the above issue is taken care of I will add an auto-zoom the map view. When it's opened it will show both the target location as well as the current location. It shows only the current location right now, but I'd like it to zoom in/out far enough so that it shows the current location and the target location both on the same map screen appropriately. I think I know how to do this; it will just take a little math and playing around with the API to make sure I'm thinking about this correctly. I almost left this for another update but couldn't. Like the compass it just wouldn't feel right unless I get this working okay for the update.

Oh, and I've added a preference to choose to see magnetic north or true north, with the default set to true north.

Once I submit the update I'll post again and reiterate the feature list for the new version.

Suggestions, comments and criticism are always welcome. Thanks for dropping by!

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!