Notices

Right. If the tower accuracy was better, this could be extremely useful information. For example, I was originally tinkering with an idea something like
- if we don't get a GPS lock, but the LAST GPS lock is within the accuracy radius of the cell tower lock, assume it is still the GPS lock, but if not, take the cell tower.

All such logic sounds clever, but completely breaks due to the useless reported "accuracy" of towers

Next build (whenever I get around to make one) will have this change, it's a supertrivial change.

/Z

May I say, if you care about 100 meters you should look for GPS accurate lock only. Issue being, even with "20 meters", subsequent positions jump around by 50 meters under normal circumstances.

Using the positioning desktop applet I can see it wiggle. Not to mention GPS has about 10 meters under ideal circumstances, add real life and it goes dancing for 20-50 meters.

If you want this kind of accuracy, use GPS perfect lock, but what if it isn't available? Smallest radius? For how long? Is it worth having GPS working a minute for a relative improvement of basically within tolerance of a lock?

IMO, lock mode should be Tower, GPS, Tower+GPS and GPS+tower.

In Tower+GPS, it tries tower. If tower is good, hurray.
In GPS+Tower, it tries tower. Then GPS. If GPS fails or is worse than tower, use tower.

Idea being that one does high precision or bust, the other is best try. Then there's battery-saving tower and battery-eating GPS.

Alternately, have Tower and GPS ckeckboxes, and another chack to "use best guess".

If tower, try tower. If GPS, try GPS. If use best guess, it uses the best accuracy it could. Not if it's completely off, though, with a limit like it is now. Ideally, GPS could have a manual timeout setting for each. Me, e.g., I'd keep GPS on, 10 seconds (either I'm out or not), tower and use best guess if under 1000 meters.

So, check box GPS, check Tower, Lock time limit and accuracy limit edit boxes. Should cover all situations thus far?

This is roughly what is there already. You have three modes:

"Cell tower": Takes any position it gets... doesn't even try to turn the GPS ON

"Cell+GPS". Turns the GPS, and tries for a while (30 seconds for now, and not configurable, for now - this might change, but I don't want to clutter the UI with useless minuteae) and if no GPS fix comes in, settles for the cell tower fix... if a GPS fix DOES come in, take that.

"GPS Only". As per above, but if 30 seconds pass with no GPS fix, it simply doesn't do anything and ignores it, never actually uses a cell location AT ALL.

Interesting. I'll think about it. In a sense, I have all those parameters already, tho the timeout and the accuracy limit are not configurable at this point.

/Z

Thanks MasterZap for creating ZapLoc and for your receptive approach to feedback in this forum.

I'd appreciate a selectable GPS fix duration: at the moment (0.9.4-41) ZapLoc background daemon normally puts me around 400 metres away from my true position when I'm at home, but the UI gets it right if I leave it open for a bit. The "googlelatitude" app was more accurate for me (before it broke).

If I find it drains the battery too much, I'd decrease the update interval rather than lose accuracy. Accuracy is more important to me.

Have you set it in the "GPS" mode, not "GPS+Cell"? And use the latest version (build 44) .

But you may actually get what you want in next version (i.e. settable timeout). Doesn't hurt to make it a settable option....

/Z

I've now upgraded and reconfigured and will see how it goes. Thanks!

I really love this app, finally I can join my friends in our FourSquare madness
Only downside is that I can't seem to enable Facebook Places in build 45. The error is:
This only happens wih Facebook Places. I've already added a FouurSquare account.

Yep, and with the Auto-checkin feature, you'll be Mayor everywhere, because you'll never forget checking in

Hmm, this means that your profile picture on Facebook wasn't a jpeg file... which the code assumes.

I can wrap this in an exception handler so it doesn't break.

/Z

Well, this happens as soon as I tick the Facebook Places checkbox. So at this point the app doesn't even know what kind of profile picture I have...

V45 caused a huge battery drain due to reason that it left GPS on even time out was set to 30s. I used GPS only mode because GSM cell gives wrong location in my home area (don't know why and don't care).

I reverted back to v44 and no more problems with high current consumption.
Status menu showed that GPS receiving coarse location all the time and it never switched off.

1st circle shows when updated to v45, 2nd when reverted to v44.