Time Flies...

... or seems to.

It's been just over a week since Geopher Lite was released. In that time we've managed to get an update from apple through the works and get everyone's hopes up. And dashed. =)

Yeah... about the google maps thing... Long story short, I kept hearing about how people were using the google maps directions to do geocaching. So, I added a link using google maps directions. Little did I know that it snapped to the closest street. What can I say, I was so happy about developing geopher that I've used that instead of google maps for geocaching. =) I'll fix this with the next version.

In the meantime, may I suggest using Geopher Lite's target screen to get you the rest of the way to the cache if you need to.

I've already got the next version well under way. I'll be doing some more coding this evening on the next update. I'm not going to rush it into the review process like I did the last one. I'll get it in there in a timely manner, but it won't be like last time, within 24 hours of the launch of Geopher Lite.

Keep the comments and critique coming. =)

Geopher Lite 1.0.3 Now available

... or is it?

About an hour ago I got an email from apple. The relevant portion is here:



and here:



I haven't seen any change on the iTunes store and it's still listed as in review, but it's not really...? Odd. Keep an eye out, hopefully that changes here soon and the update will really be available. Keep your fingers crossed! =)

Update: the updated app is now available via the iTunes store.

Update

Quick update.

I am a bit disappointed that apple hasn't released my update to Geopher Lite yet. I was hoping that it would be today. No such luck.

I've been pretty busy the last few days and haven't had much of a chance to work on Geopher Lite. I'm losing a bit of sleep tonight and tweaking a few things here and there. I've made some headway on the battery life, but probably lost all that I gained due to not having the device go to sleep when on the target screen. I've also throttled back the location updates from continuous to every few feet. And lastly I've added some tweaks to the coordinate entering system -- it will now auto-fill your direction (NESW) and the hours portion of the coordinate.

I've also started down the road of changing the compass to rotate and given some thought on skins. I am planning on spending more time tomorrow evening on Geopher Lite, I'll let you know more then. Also, once I get some more visible changes I'll post some more screenshots. It's getting a bit dull in here. =)

As a side note, I took my iPhone 3g with me geocaching today and found two caches. Everything worked smoothly. Geocaching at it's best; logging the cache as you are standing there is quite nice.

More later.

Q & A

A number of suggestions and comments have been posted, I feel like I should address a few.

Regarding battery life. I am in the process of changing the way that Geopher Lite gets updates from the GPS unit, as it is more frequent than it needs to be right now. However, this may not be enough to take care of the battery problem, the GPS will still be on in the background. I may change this so that if you are within a certain distance from your target the GPS is on all the time (like right now), but before that it turns on and off for updates. The big problem comes in when turning it on or off, if the GPS will be as accurate or not. I'm playing with a few things and am working on this, I'll keep you posted.

Regarding Inputting coordinates. This is a concern and I've done a few things to make this easier, but it's still not great. Without writing my own keyboard, I'm not sure how much I can do here. I am planning on at least auto-entering the NESW letters depending on current location for the user, that way it's all just the numbers portion. I have also tried splitting up the single text field into multiple text fields, but it seems to me to be harder to use that way. I haven't tried using the menu-type scroll picker, I may look at that as well. I'll keep playing with this and see what I can do. No promises, but I'll try to have something for the update after the one that is in review with this in mind.

Regarding downloadable maps. I believe some of the bigger GPS companies (like TomTom and Telenav) are looking into making a more general purpose GPS software solution for the iPhone. I can't compete with that and don't really want to -- these companies do that already and they are very good at it. I'd be shocked if we didn't see something in the next month or two on this. If it gets extremely bad I could look into something like this, but it would be a ton of work for potentially very little benefit. If you're out hiking somewhere you might be better off with a regular GPS than just the iPhone. (But if you do use geopher out and about please let me know how it works! =) )

Regarding copy/paste. Supposedly apple is working on this right now. It would not be trivial for me to take care of this myself. I'll keep my ear to the ground on this one, I agree it would be very useful to have.

Regarding sporadic updates and losing the GPS signal. This is on my list, I am a bit uncertain on how to go about this. If I do it incorrectly it will cause Geopher to not be as accurate. If I leave it alone it sounds like it will be problematic in certain situations. I'll do what I can here, but it will take a lot of tinkering and using my changes to make sure it works.

Regarding the google maps link from geocaching.com in Geopher Lite. The theory is that this shouldn't work any differently than in safari. I'll keep my eye open and see if I can find out what's the problem here, but no promises -- there may be nothing I can do about this short of rewriting the web view.

Regarding compass rotation. I will definitely have something here with apple's next firmware update, assuming that's more than a week or two away. =) As I mentioned before in practice this was much more annoying than I expected, expect something to happen here.

Along with the compass rotation I would like to have a better way to indicate accuracy on the target screen. I've not figured out the best way to do this, but it is on the list.

Someone also asked about cookies for the web view and remembering your user on geocaching.com. If you choose the remember me checkbox when you log in to geocaching.com inside Geopher Lite it will remember you between sessions. That is already working.

To reiterate, In the currently under review update, I have made the web view a bit bigger and added a google maps button on the target screen as well as saving coordinates. Those are somewhat minimal changes, but they will alleviate a lot of concern and pain of use until I can get some of the other details worked out.

Whew. Big list. Thanks everyone for your patience and understanding. I hope that something is better than nothing and that I made the right decision to release this when I did. More later.

Okay, I lied.

I just can't leave it alone. ;)

I took my new iPhone 3G out for it's first geocaching run this evening. I left my magellan at home to see how it worked.

I intentionally drove a few miles. My work on saving coordinates paid off, I got to watch my testing coordinates move my target arrow down the road.

With the 3G phone I was able to quickly pull up the first traditional cache I could find. What luck, it was about 200 meters from me. In a park that doubled for a water basin along the road a block away. There were a bunch of kids there so I decided to look for another cache. I picked a cache that I recognized and had previously wanted to hit but hadn't had the time. I drove nearly right to it and wandered around for a minute. I didn't know how much to trust the GPS in the iPhone, so instead of trusting it I looked first where I thought the cache would be. After a minute or two I gave up and followed the coordinates, not really believing them.

And there it was, right where the iPhone said it should be. Within a meter. Guess I need to be less trusting of the haters out there that have trashed the GPS in the iPhone. =)

I came away from this experience with a couple of things.

First, it's much more annoying than I thought to not have the compass auto-rotate. This will be much easier to do with the new firmware that apple has in beta, but I may do something here sooner than that. Did I mention it was annoying? =) I wish I had had access to a 3G iPhone sooner, some o fthis would have been taken care of via testing like this.

Second, the screen going dark and locking is terribly annoying. I know how to fix this, but I didn't believe that it would be a huge issue. I hated this. Mark that one down for the next update.

Third, the arrow and coordinates are updating a ton. And I mean a TON. I may actually throttle back the updates, it really doesn't need to happen more than once or twice a second. It's nice, but it's got to be a battery drain.

Fourth, the accuracy is more of a problem than I thought. With no indication of accuracy I was never sure really how close I was to the cache. Once I lost the GPS signal and my range jumped to almost a kilometer then back again fairly quickly. I'll have to add something for both of these in there.

Gotta love usability testing. =)

Oh, I have added a FAQ here. Please post any questions and/or answers that you feel would be appropriate for geopher lite.

Again, I'm planning on doing a Q/A response to some of the comments here soon, but I won't force you to sit through that at the moment.

Thanks for stopping by.

1.0.3

Some needed updates submitted just a few minutes ago. I wasn't so sure about the google directions thing, but after playing around with it I can see the draw. It's pretty well done.

Geopher Lite 1.0.3 Changelog
- Added a map button that will open the maps application with directions to your current target.
- Changed the keyboard popup for the waypoint to have a clear background.
- Added saving functionality to current and target location and waypoint information.
- Added help button (FAQ).
- Removed the Log button and waypoint text field. (May be re-added in the future)
- Reorganized the target selection screen.



My next focus will be the compass screen and what we can do there to make it more usable. I wasn't able to complete the skins implementation to my satisfaction so that will have to wait as well. (Sorry Victor!)

I may not do a whole lot the next few days, I have a lot of other stuff going on. I'll nibble at the compass screen UI and functionality while we wait for apple to approve this next update. I'll probably post tomorrow or saturday with some feedback on some of the comments you guys have left as well. I may not be able to keep that up forever, but I'll do what I can until it becomes unmanageable.

Per usual, feedback and comments are welcome. Thanks for dropping by.

What goes down...

...must come up?

I think I'm going to lose more hair on this project than any other I've done to date.

Good and bad news.

First the bad. I've had some further discussion via email with the groundspeak guys, and there will be no changes. I can't do anything particularly useful with the geocaching.com site other than display it.

However, the good news is that I can keep the app in the app store. As long as I don't infringe on their terms of use we will be okay. (Geopher Lite as-is is not currently breaking their terms of use) That includes things like auto-entering coordinates. (Sorry) I can tell already that this will be the number one unfulfilled request. It's a pain, but there is little I can do here, at least in the short term.

This means a few things for geopher and geopher lite. One is that geopher lite may become geopher full, simply because I won't be able to do what I'd like to do with the data. I understand in a way why groundspeak is so protective of their data. It's hard-earned. As a geocacher I am disappointed that I won't get any sort of functionality like geocache navigator on the iPhone. (And I didn't even know that that software existed more than two weeks ago) Regardless, I am going to continue to work on Geopher Lite and continue to update it, both with functionality and bug fixes. If they will actually merge I haven't decided, but this makes that a much greater possibility.

As I am back in town I will be picking up my iPhone 3G tomorrow, assuming the AT&T store isn't closed for a state holiday that falls on the 24th of July. That would be just my luck. =) However, as it's a state holiday I have tomorrow off of work and plan on spending it for the betterment of Geopher Lite. Look for an additional post tomorrow about what I have done, likely in the evening.

If you have purchased Geopher Lite, please leave feedback on if you are having problems with the arrow not moving problem that has already been mentioned. I have only been able to test this with a first generation iPhone, however the arrow has moved properly for me when driving around in a car. (cell towers don't get me that reliable of a fix on the first gen iPhone) I would be interested in hearing more on this. I know of a possible workaround to force updates more often in the code, but it's not recommended by apple and according to their documentation what I have currently should "just work".

I would also like in general to have feedback for the application. What you do and don't like, complaints, concerns and praise are all accepted. I won't promise I'll fix your personal gripe, but I will promise to read it and ponder why you are saying what you are saying. =)

Also, to answer a few questions / comments.

I will not be allowed to directly access .GPX or .LOC files regardless of premium or not status. That is against the terms of use. (I can't even grab the target coordinates off of the web page and pre-fill the text fields with that information... I am pretty restricted on gathering the data)

To enter coordinates you can use decimal coordinates or hour and decimal minutes coordinates. Geocaching.com uses hour and then decimal minutes as a format, that is the default that is displayed in Geopher Lite. Look here for more on how this works. I should also mention that full hour, minute, second input and display is on the list as is an option to choose the default coordinate style. Also you don't need to enter the degree symbol, just use a space there. The text field will auto-format once you are done and that will help give you feedback on the data you enter here.

Miles versus kilometers is on the list. It's not a high priority, but it's there.

Additionally someone on the app store reviews inferred that the compass itself not rotating was an issue. That is on the list.

My highest priority is saving the target information between sessions. That's an annoyance that should have never been there and I apologize for that.

One last thing. Would it be more harmful than helpful to put a link up inside the app to the google maps directions based on the currently selected target? What do you all think?