Mapping SPOT messages

[merri_death]

Hi. I receive SPOT text messages from family members and want to be
able to automatically see their location on a map without having to
enter the coordinates. I thought this app could do that but it does
not seem to work... I am new to all this and am hoping you can help
me. Thanks!

[Kevin Hester]

Hmm - it seems to work okay for me.  Have you set your phone # as one of the recipients of the spot message?  Can you send me a sample of one of your spot messages (off list)?  

[Matt Smith]

Doesn't work for me either.

I wonder if its because I am using handcent as my SMS.

I'd happily pay the donate version if it worked....

Matt

[Kevin Hester]

Hi Matt,

Can you email me one of your spot messages (kev...@geeksville.com)? I
suspect the formatting must be subtly different. To capture the
message:
* Send it via SMS to your phone
* copy and paste the contents of the SMS text into an email to me.

[Brendan Reid]

Hi Kevin,

Great idea and it is very nearly working on my phone.

On Android 2.2 (HTC Desire) i forwarded one of my buddies previous SPOT landing SMSs to myself and GeoSMS picked up the new arrival and notified me.

The steps going into the app are 

1) TRY/DONATE screen

2) map screen showing flashing blue icon but no background map.    This is on wifi at home but i tried outside with gps signal and similar result

3) If i short press on the icon for my buddy in the middle of the map screen i get a tool tip with the correct lat/lon/name for my friend.

4) if i long press i get a "navigate to" which works and the map comes up correctly in the android navigate screens with the correct lat/lon target coords - i can zoom and out and verify the map location roughly using this method although not so good for off road locations.     This makes the app usable for me 

So it looks to me as if there is a hang up in step 2) where it spends ages trying get a gps fix before displaying the map?    Or some other hang up to do with map display?    I tried both types of map (street and satellite, same result).    Perhaps it tries to find your own gps position first because app is getting ready to send OUT a GeoSMS?

Update to Android 2.3 now available so will try that and see if it works better there...

Bren

[Brendan Reid]

oh, and can you include terrain map as an option :)

bren

[Kevin Hester]

Actually - Yesterday I briefly put out a bad load. Map display should
be fixed now (in the 1.23 version). Thank you for the reports.

[Kevin Hester]

Alas - Terrain map isn't supported by the current google maps API
(though obviously they have it since they use it in their maps). For
my other Android app (gaggle) I've switched to open-street-map which
has lots of good terrain map options. It will probably be a while
before GeoSMS switches (it is a fair amount of work).

[Brendan Reid]

Thanks Kevin - will try new version and let you know.    On OSM I understand.

[Brendan Reid]

New version (1.23) works great :)

[Brendan Reid]

kevin,

not suggesting you do this but just letting you know that someone appears to have figured out the google maps terrain API

android app Maverick works well with google terrain maps (as well as a range of other maps) and caches them for later use on the SD card.

there is also a third party tool (Mobile Atlas Creator windoze only) to download whole areas of map at specified zoom levels (OSM only).    It took a while and i felt a bit guilty about hitting the OSM servers so hard but i now have the majority of Scotland in OSM Cyclemap on my SD card at zoom levels 9, 11, 13 and 15 for offline use - we are quite often in areas with poor cellphone coverage.    I think mobile atlas allows you to run a changed tiles search for periodic updating...

hmmnn tom just got a new job doing OSM mapping so there is probably a better way :)

cheers

bren