Monday, December 20, 2010

Map tweaks

Just a quick update before Christmas.  (Merry Christmas!)

I took a coding break over the weekend, work has been rough and I needed to take some non-productive relaxation time.  (With 4 kids I don't get a lot, but I take what I can get when I need it!  =) )

I have done the following things since the last update though:
- Added an alert in the map view if there is no network reachability.  More needs done here but this works in a pinch.
- Changed the map zoom to work more as expected when swapping to the map view.  Also tapping the current location arrow twice will do two different things -- first tap will move the map to center on your current location.  An additional tap will zoom you in close to the current location.
- Added the new 4.0+ GPS accuracy.  Geopher Lite used the best accuracy available at the time and while it was a battery drain, I got a number of questions on why Geopher Lite was more accurate than other GPS apps on the iPhone.  I'm thinking that (later on) I'd like to change this so that it's dynamic -- so the update frequency changes depending on how fast you're moving and/or how close to the cache you're looking for you are.  There are some problems with this, but I'm confident that you could have it tone down the battery drainage if you're further away from the target cache.  Then again, that may just be a setting that defaults to the highest setting.  We'll see how things go.

I also heard recently that sending a target to navigon would be possible, so I'll add that to my list of todo items as well.

There have been some nay-sayers on the iPhone's GPS capabilities.  I personally don't think an iPhone is any worse than the cheap handhelds, especially from a few years ago.

Even so, I'm thinking of making an averaging system for cache placement for better coordinate gathering over a minute or so.  Even if it's just superstition

What are your thoughts on cache placement with an iPhone?  Good or bad?  And why?

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