MasterZap | # 11 | 2011-05-15, 14:46 | Report

No quite a lot of thought was put into that, not to waste power (see updated 1st post).

If you ONLY need it for Latitude, this program is a bit overkill. If you want I can post the latitude-only daemon, but with the same "power saving" tricks, over in the Latitude thread. It would save you disk space at least

/Z

petur | # 12 | 2011-05-15, 21:06 | Report

Thanks for your hard work. May I suggest some features:
- option to only use cell
- option to use gps only when moving (cell loc changing)
- option to do faster updates when moving

option 1 is what interests me most - looking for a cell-only latitude updater

stavrov69 | # 13 | 2011-05-16, 01:18 | Report

Option for adding photos is another good feature...
Great app, thanks for the hard word...

MasterZap | # 14 | 2011-05-16, 05:14 | Report

If the #1 is what you want, there is already one in the Latitude thread. Use Azteku's original "latitude-updater.py", since it only does cell tower mode.

Personally, I find "cell tower only" COMPLETELY useless. This is probably because I'm in the coutry, and "cell towers" are things between 2 and 8 miles away from me, and, honestly, locating me with that "accuracy" (if that's the word) is more than meaningless, it's just plain misleading and wrong.

Also, I don't know how you would ever do auto-checkin to spots with accuracy of less-than-100-m with cell towers.

HOWEVER: The other two features are planned
- photos
- and ONLY update the GPS position when cell tower changes

The latter even has a spot in the UI already, but it doesn't actually work right yet.

The idea is to be a "best of both worlds"; i.e. not turn the GPS on *at all* unless the cell tower changes. When it DOES change, it turns on the GPS for a little while to at least *try* get get a better estimate of location than the crappy cell tower location.

Wouldn't that be BETTER than "cell tower only", y'think?


Also, "faster updates while moving" is actually already there. I said the GPS sleeps for X minutes between "takes"? Well, actually, it only "sleeps" if your speed is below a certain number. There is a different (built in, not currently configurable) time limit between these samples of 2 minutes. So if you take a drive you should actually be able to track that drive on your Latitude history.


/Z

---

Last edited by MasterZap; 2011-05-16 at 05:17.

zehjotkah | # 15 | 2011-05-16, 05:47 | Report

You should enter the MeeGo Coding Competition with that app!

morti | # 16 | 2011-05-16, 06:55 | Report

First of all, great idea and wonderful implementation so far!

A few comments/questions:
- There seems to be a problem when phone is in offline mode, it keeps trying to get a location and quickly drains the entire battery. Updating location should be disabled in offline mode
- There seem to be some problems with changing the update frequency, at least when background updates are enabled. I had the frequency at 5 minutes for a time and then changed it back to 1 hour, but the updates kept coming frequently every 5 minutes for a long time afterwards
- Would it be possible to get a command line command for changing some options, especially the update frequency? Depending on the situation (at home, at work, on the go) I like to have different update frequencies, and starting the ZapLoc is a bit too cumbersome to do every time. Furthermore, I anyway use a script for changing my "state", so adding one more command there would be very convenient

Thanks again for your efforts!

petur | # 17 | 2011-05-16, 08:01 | Report

Well... different circumstances and different usecases
- Over here, the place is littered with towers, and the plan is to even consider smaller cells to handle the increasing amount of users.
- I only share/use latitude location on city level, so the accuracy of cell-tower here (<500m) is more than enough for me.

Main reason is: GPS off -> more battery time

btw, ZapLoc failed to install here. This is what faster application manager said:

MasterZap | # 18 | 2011-05-16, 08:17 | Report

Well, for the use case of ZapLoc (wherein latitude is just a little side-effect I added recently), even <500m is somewhat less than useable. If all you want is latitude at "city level", I really suggest Azketu's script from the latitude thread.... ZapLoc is aimed at way better accuracy than that.

Let me put it this way: Sure, in theory, I could add "cell-tower-only location". But since that is useless for spot-checkins I would have to disable that feature, most likely... then... why would you be using ZapLoc in the first place? Then I would need to add larger fudge radius for checkins, and you'll be checkin in to the coffee shop down the street ALL THE TIME even though you are home

Is that useful? :/

But I'll consider adding it anyway... simply because it's probably quite easy to do. It will come with a warning that it'll probably make parts of the program unusable tho.

What the ¤/(##.... we just had this working. I didn't touch anything (except attemp to promote the package to extras). What's the problem!?!? *argh*

EDIT: Oh I know what happened. ZapLoc got promoted to extras/testing, but the google package it depends on didn't..... ODD. You need to grab google-api-python-client from extras/devel then.

*facepalm*

/Z

---

Last edited by MasterZap; 2011-05-16 at 08:24.

petur | # 19 | 2011-05-16, 08:23 | Report

if only I had the time I'd write my own smart updater :/

MasterZap | # 20 | 2011-05-16, 08:26 | Report

But what needs to be smart about it with only city accuracy? Azketu's updater will be fine.... It will only detect cell tower changes. And only update on change. And won't suck battery (cell tower location detection takes no extra battery, even though the GPS icon is lit up)

As an alternative, you can take mine just posted to the Latitude thread, but change it back to use cell towers (it's a single line change) and be done with it.

/Z