Ever needed your partner to track your whereabouts? Foam (Find On A Map) may be a specialised S60 application, but Ewan (and I) can think of several valid uses. Essentially, it offers a real time GPS tracking feed to a graphical web service, about which you can then tell those you choose to share your location with. Pretty cool and very useful for those 'Where's Daddy?' moments when leaving your family on a business trip.
Read on in the full article.
my main concern with this is battery life...
I'm going to test the battery implications as I wonder if it will last long enough for me to complete the London Marathon in April whilst signalling my position to anyone who wants to see how far I've got!
But what isn't clear at all is how much data will need to be transmitted at each communication to update the position? I cannot believe this is not even mentioned anywhere on the developers website. There will be a data cost so I think users need some indication of what to expect when they get their next bill from the network.
using the internal GPS would drain the battery i'd assume as it would (probably) mean keeping an active lock for however long it was active.
would a bluetooth one only check via bluetooth every say 5 mins?
I asked Ian about internal GPS. The current version doesn't support internal GPS, although a version that will is currently going through Symbian signing process.
You can set the update frequency to be between 1 and 10 minutes. I'd like to see the option for a longer interval too for longer journeys etc.
The other thing to be aware of (which I think is probably a limitation of Google Maps) is that I tracked my partner on a trip from Berkshire to Biggleswade today - he had it set to update every minute on a journey of about an hour and a half, and after the first 26 markers (A-Z), Google maps only shows a shadow of a marker.
So, if you're planning on a long trip, set the update interval accordingly!
I've also asked if it would be possible to add meaningful names / tags to the Device IDs you're tracking, and it sounds as though it's something that will probably be added in the future.
Julie
P.S. To give you an idea, Andy uploaded over 130 updates from FOAM today (according to the data on the website), and has uploaded a total of 420Kb of data, including other things (not sure what, sorry). Must do better checking!
Julie
these free services have been out for a while. Psiloc has locatik which is very good and has several other features including easy to remember tracking names and there is 3dtracking.net which allows the mapping to be included on your own website. Both are native symbian apps and both use the internal GPS. Mike.