maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)

MasterZap	2011-06-08 , 05:46
Posts: 214 \| Thanked: 140 times \| Joined on Aug 2010	#211

Originally Posted by woody14619

There is one thing to consider about A-GPS: The liblocation sub-library does send data to sup.nokia.com to ask where it's at given then tower list. Unlike the iPhone, the N900 doesn't cache that info locally to do local look ups. So if the interval is really short it may eat some GPRS data if it's checking A-GPS location every 5 minutes.

Yeah, but these are not many bits... surely if you have an N900 you are on a data plan

Anyway, as clarified above, if you are in wifi, it doesn't even try to start the GPS or celltower stuff at all.

Originally Posted by woody14619

It could be if you don't want to generate the A-GPS data, but still want the auto-checking functionality based on the wifi info.

Oh yeah. I just said "I never *thought* about that as useful", emphasis on "didn't think about that". It's actually quite clever, and I will try to support that in a next version.

Originally Posted by woody14619

I get having the interval to make sure you're not checking into a place if you pass it while walking past it. But I could see a use for allowing no GPS checking at all. If all the places you want to check in have wifi, there's no need to turn on GPS at all. Either you can see the wifi or you can't...

Right. Agreed. I'll do it. Heck, WiFi is actually more useful than cell location (I never really found cell location useful at all, but users explicitly wanted it, so it's in there as an option....)

Originally Posted by woody14619

I was unaware of the option. I'll give it a try to see if I can figure out why it's not working for me with GPS coordinates. I've been auto-checked in a few times now, but only to places where I've set the wifi network as the trigger area. Good news: Wifi based check-in works great! So I'll try the verbose mode, output to a file, to see what it's thinking about and why it's not liking the GPS enough to check me into places.

Yeah, the verbose mode is quite useful for debugging. It was funny, though, if you archeologize through this thread, there was once a bug in that I had - by pure accident - put code that actually did work inside the verbose printout section, meaning... any time you turned on "verbose printout" everything worked... when you turned it off - it stopped working. Quite a debugging aid

That's fixed now, tho.

Originally Posted by woody14619

One question on the wifi checking: Is this based only on the SSID, or do you register the MAC address in some way as well?

It is actually based on what the Maemo "conic" library considers the "id" of the connection. I am not terribly certain what that is, but it is most certainly NOT the SSID (it's some long hex-number, but much longer than a mac adress)

I think it is the number is a database id in the connection database in Maemo (pure guess, though), and if so, maybe, then, if all Starbucks connect to the same Starbucks access point in your phone, there may be problems here, and I will need to start checking Mac's or somesuch (no idea how to do that, though....)

So I personally do not know if this id is per-basestation-unique or not; tests on this would be quite helpful. In "verbose" mode it informs you of any connection/disconnection events including spitting out the stupidly long hex-number-thingy, so if someone who lives somewhere where, say, multiple Starbucks exists, could test this, it would be... useful.

Originally Posted by woody14619

If it's based on MAC, or a combo of the two, that would prevent accidental check-ins.

Right. Unfortunately I don't know the exact meaning of the conic library's "id" number.

Originally Posted by woody14619

One comment: Not sure you're aware of this, but many people who use this are also likely to use a nav app on the phone. More than likely ModRana or NavIt. Both of those have settings to cache the tiles locally on the N900, and are happy to share those tiles with other apps. You may want to look that their threads to see how to access those tiles so you don't have to download them every time.

I do already cache the tiles, and I share the format (basically directory structure under /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/) with what CloudGPS uses. Not sure what ModRana or NavIt uses, though, but it wouldn't surprise me if it is already the same. I'll check those threads out. EDIT: It seems to be the same, so this is already in. Yay.

Originally Posted by woody14619

One small bug I've found: If the GPS fails to lock and I close the app before it locks, the app portion sometimes lives on in the background until kill it off

Interesting. Not sure why it would do that... perhaps a bug in the location subsystem, not liking to be turned off at some certain "point" in it's startup, or something?

I'll check the code, but I think I'm trying to shut the GPS down properly when exiting. Tho if there is an actual crash, my exit code may not always run.

Originally Posted by woody14619

Overall though, this is really a great program! I love the auto-checkin where it works, and even using it as a client to manually check-in most places is really nice thanks to the fluid interface. Very well done.

Thank you sir.

It all started as a toy for myself, and learning som oauth coding, and learning some heavier Python coding..... well frankly, it all started with me trying to teach my kid programming, and beginning work on a game.... (which you guys may see the results of some day... maybe...)

/Z

Last edited by MasterZap; 2011-06-08 at 06:18.

Quote & Reply |