Notices

Checked the behavior with multiple access points with the same SSID today, and confirmed that it's NOT working correctly (0.9.4-53).

The scenario: I have set up a ZapLoc autocheck-in with the wlan access point at our office in city X. I also have autoconnect on to that network, so when I arrive at the office, I'm automatically checked in to foursquare etc., as well as to the exact latitude spot. This is perfect, as the building is too thick to otherwise get a gps fix, and my battery would be drained quickly.

Today I went to our office in city Y. My phone automatically connected to the local wlan with the same SSID as in the other office, which is how it's expected to work. Unfortunately, however, I was then checked in to the office in city X, and my latitude location naturally was also updated to that spot.

In summary, you should use something in addition to the SSID to determine whether it's really the same place. I'm concerned about using the MAC address though - in my case, our offices as well as the university campus, for example, use one SSID for the entire area, but with multiple (a lot of) access points. A simple MAC address comparison would only allow setting up auto check-in for that particular access point, in my understanding.

A better solution in my case would be to use in addition to the SSID the cell tower you're connected to - this should ensure that you're in the same general area as when you set up the auto check-in, not in a different city at least.. but then again for many of us the cell tower also varies throughout the day, even if you're staying in one spot. Any other suggestions?

Too bad. Not sure what I can do about it without imposing a battery drain... :/

Right. But in most run-of-the-mill cases, that would be sufficient. Large campuses will have to resort to GPS, simply... or something.

Yeah, for me, cell tower keeps jumping like a rabbit on steroids between 4 different towers around me, so that would be quite useless.

I really don't have a particularily great idea. If I can figure out the Mac address and tie it to this as well, without sucking power, I will try this, but it WILL then only work for one access point.

I really don't have the energy to code a whole new layer of location features that should have been in the location layer in the first place anway... .I think one needs to be happy there is WiFi positioning at all

/Z

Yeah, don't get me wrong - tying into the MAC address would be great already, and would fix the most severe problems. I hope you can make it work without too much effort.

Sadly, getting the APN mac address (aka BSSID) is only available at the time of a scan. That would mean initiating a scan, or... using this brilliant idea:

One thing you could do it just register for the dbus signals for when the device does a scan, without initiating one yourself. That would let you "piggy back" on what the system is already doing without using much extra power.

With libconic you can register just certain signals, including the scan result signals. In fact, that's how most things scan wifi: Setup a signal sink, initiate a scan, parse/record the flow, timeout eventually or periodically re-initiate the scan.

Thing is, you don't have to actually initiate a scan to listen to the signals. Just register on the signal to get scan results, and when anything else in the system calls out for a scan, you get the results forked to you as well "for free" (minus some minor CPU usage to parse said signals).

The signal you'd want to register (probably via libconic) is:
There's code showing an example of how to parse the signal data here. (Sorry, it's in C, couldn't find anything in python.)

This would also give you the option of seeing what's around you, and not just what you're connected to. All without using any more battery than what's already being used by the system (plus the cpu time used to parse the dbus messages).

Optionally, you could also "remember" the last list to aid in making the drop-down of wifi access point(s) in the creation/edit dropdown Or, if you didn't want to do that, you can always initiate a scan yourself, say as the user creates a zaploc point and it's querying the services for similar venues, it could also scan for APNs around the user right then.

Actually, using the scan info, they would only have to "see" the other point. Even if the system chooses to connect another APN because it's closer, the others would probably still be in the list, for small areas. For large areas like a campus, you'd probably have different points setup in various areas anyway (dorm, cafeteria, classrooms, etc). But for small companies (with 3 or 4 repeaters) getting one or two from the "middle" of the building would probably still be seen in the scan list, even if it's not connected to due to signal strength.

Also, you could optionally remember all BSSID with a matching SSID together as one point. That would increase the general area one could be in to auto-register while simplifying the user interface. (One choice for "CompanyWifi", remembering all 3 BSSID with it.) It may complicate your internals, making it a list of SSID/BSSID to check against vs just one. That's a feature/effort trade off I suppose.

I think we are all quite grateful to have such a wonderful application and a dedicated developer! And yes, having any Wifi (or the option of auto-check-in capability at all) is a great thing. I think I speak for most here when I say we're very happy for all the work you've put into this already, as it really is a great application!

We're just coming up with ideas that could make it all the better from a user perspective. If it stays static where it is now, I'm still quite happy to have it, and will continue to use it. (I' happy to have a service like FourSquare at all, an app to use it vs the crappy web interface rocks!) Having additional functionality will just make me more likely to use zaploc to it's fullest.

Hole Useful Information Dump, Batman! THANK YOU.

I won't have time to do much about this any time soon though, but I'll take a look. Another thought that struck me is that I can simply do a scan on the connection event, which happens once, rather than every X minutes, and try some assumptions from there.

We'll see. Won't happen quickly, tho.

/Z

I did a quick experiment of this and it didn't seem to work; it seems the code only sees the notification of scanning it itself initiated... I have no idea why

/Z

I also have this problem, only for finding facebook places though. It still finds Foursquare and ZapLoc locations with no problems.
If I look for facebook places I only get the above message.
only been happening approx the last 3 days or so, possibly since the last software update? Any help gratefully appreciated - and thanks for a fab app!!

further to this, it will find Foursquare & ZapLoc locations but won"t check into them on Facebook... it says it's doing the check-in but doesn't.
If it helps, when you go to the Set Up services menu, it shows Gowalla and Foursquare, but just hangs now and doesn't bring Facebook up any more...
Am on v55.

Cheers!

Have you tried to force a re-authorization with facebook? Maybe even go into facebook itself and explicitly remove ZapLoc in there, and then re-authorize it?

/Z

I can't find anything specifically relating to ZapLoc in Facebook to remove? Could that be the problem? I can find the application itself but no options to either add/remove or allow/remove access?
I must have allowed it access previously for it to have worked, but it doesn't appear in my list of facebook apps so I can't remove its access?
I did have two apps called 'Nokia N900' in facebook which I removed, then removed ZapLoc from my N900.
I then reinstalled ZapLoc and the first time I went into the 'Set up Services' menu in ZapLoc (the menu where you tick the boxes to allow access to Gowalla, Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter) it showed all four of the services and Facebook was there and ticked. Then when I went back to the map screen to try and check in first of all I got HTTP Timeout and now I'm getting the HTTP 400 Bad request message again.
Also when I try the set up services menu again, it comes up with Gowalla and Foursquare again, but then hangs and doesn't bring up Facebook and Twitter. I have to switch to phone mode and terminate the app while it's minimised as it just hangs there at that point...

Thanks