Best way to display daily locations with tasker..

[Rich D]

This is mostly a question for Dave Fisher but hopefully others will add ideas as well...

Dave, I noticed on the other post you have a whole lot of location checking going on. I am curious if you have a task for displaying all of these points on a map or how you actually use all this data..  The reason I ask is I just finished a task that does this to replace a app i was using from the app store.  So far I am very happy with it but always looking for new ideas and improvements... 

Here is what i have so far ..

I save my work day locations every 15 minutes.  I wanted to put it all in one file but i was having a hard time figuring out how to search and split  the data to display the location at a given date/ time (I believe it was my lack of knowledge of regex was to blame) so I found the easiest way for me was to create 2 files per day named.

'Current date'-loc.text.      IE--  2013-1-8-loc.txt
'Current date'-time.text.           2013-1-8-time.txt

One saves locations -- lat,lon|lat,lon|
The other %TIMES----  TIMES,TIMES

I am not sure how much extra space on the drive this requires but it was the best way for me..

This made it easy using the %TIMES variable to find and spilt the data for viewing..

For the viewer I chose google maps. Pent has graciously given us a show map action which does a great job for displaying a point on the map with zoom capabilities as well. As usually I needed just a little bit more.

A little background info ...
I use several location apps for hiking,camping,riding,work etc.. so if I want to save my current location for future use and be able to edit it, search for it, navigate to it or add extra data to it then 'google location favorites ' is NOT what I need.  The absolute best way i have found to save locations is to save them as a google contact. This can be done directly from google maps and lets you do all of the above actions....

So I naturally wanted to include this feature with my viewer.  I found the proper URI to send to google maps (thank you very much Vladimir) to open maps with a search.  Just as if i had typed the lat,Lon into the search bar for google maps. This discussion can be found here..

https://groups.google.com/group/tasker/browse_thread/thread/2b37f970e834a616/f706b7541c8ab97f?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=google+maps+uri#f706b7541c8ab97f

This gives me a address for the point and allows me to easily save it to contacts.....  very cool....... the one downfall is you need a data connection for the viewer to work.

So I start with a scene that allows me to select the date and time, after selecting the time it will show the location on google maps with a overlay that lets me go to the next time increment for that day or the previous time increment for that day.  So I can step through the day to see where I went for that day. 

And that's it.... please post any ideas or suggestions....

If anyone would like specifics on how I did what, please let me know,

Thanks .... Rich....

[Dave Fisher]

I had several goals I wanted to achieve.

1. A location history
2. Control over how and when the history is generated
3. To be able to reuse location in other situations, particularly weather

Ultimately I use Google Latitude, but whilst that displays the history in a nice interface, it doesn't give me the control. Latify, ALTitude and Backitude give me the control, but not the ability to reuse the location for my weather updates.

So I came up with a combination of sorts. Tasker does my location detection and weather retrieval, and Backitude updates Latitude.

Basically, when connected to WiFi, Backitude does a location resync to keep my location refreshed on Latitude, and Tasker does a weather update on the hour using a given Lat/Long for the AP I am connected to (so its accurate and not relying on iffy Google data ;)

When I am not on WiFi, Tasker does a GetLocation every 5 minutes when my Commuting profile is active, and on every 3rd update (ie. 15 mins), updates the locality and the weather via a couple of Tasker tasks. Thats displayed in a Zoom widget.

If my travel or unknown location profiles are active, then the location, weather & locality are updated every 15 minutes.

So how do I get the results of getlocation into Latitude ? Quite simply Backitude is set to steal location upates - so when any app performs a location request, Backitude grabs it and sends it to Latitude (as long as the accuracy and minimum distance requirement are met).

Ultimately I'd like to provide a lat/long pair to Backitude (or ALTitude) which can push to Latitude for me, so that my location will always be exact for known locations, rather than relying on Googles interpretation, but alas neither author have added that ability yet, despite both being open to the idea :(

I spent ages trying to fathom out how to push the locations to Latitude myself, but gave up in the end. I'd also like to perform checkins via Tasker, but that also doesn't seem possible (yet anyway).

I also dump out the location lat/long, locality, weather etc to a file, but thats mainly just for debugging.

[Rich D]

Wow.. as usual Dave an excellent, informative Post. 

Latify, ALTitude and Backitude give me the control, but not the ability to reuse the location for my weather updates.

I had no idea these apps existed. I had checked for location apps before making my tasker task but i must have dismissed these before reading the entire description because I personally  have no use at all for latitude. And just saw them as a addition to it not as stand alone apps (sort of) that do not need to send my location to the world.. I still have some reading to do but it would appear that using some or all of these could potentially replace my tasker task.. It will be worth a few bucks to check them out..

> Ultimately I'd like to provide a lat/long pair to Backitude (or ALTitude) which can push to Latitude for me, so that my location will always be exact for known locations, rather than relying on Googles interpretation

I am a little confused here. If backitude grabs your location where is the accuracy lost??

Thanks for sharing,  this was very informative.    Rich..

[Dave Fisher]

Hi Rich,

> I am a little confused here. If backitude grabs your location where is the accuracy lost??

Unless you use GPS for location, you are relying on one of two things - net location via the cell towers, or WiFi location via the Google databases. When I am out and about, I mainly use net location (and yes, before someone mentions it, I am aware that net location will also use WiFi hotspots even if you are not connected to them, but that's just complicating my explanation :-p), most of the time its good enough for me (and in fact Backitude has a built in filter with the stealing feature, that will ignore locations if their accuracy is less than a certain threshold (which I think was 400 if I recall).

When I am connected to a known WiFi network, *I* know exactly where I am, so in Tasker I specify the precise lat/long for the location, which is used by my weather/locality tasks. However, I can not pass that location to Backitude (as it wasn't a getlocation, it was just me setting a variable, see below*). Therefore Backitude will then rely on obtaining a location from the Google database for the WiFi network I am on. Most of the time this is reliable, but very often its slightly off. In many cases, such as at work, its a non-issue, it just shows me on site, but in the wrong area. But when I am at friends/family it can be so far out it puts me on the wrong street or at a neighbours address.

You also have the issue of the database going out of whack - for example, if I move and take my router with me, then Google will think I'm still in the old location until their database is updated, which requires either another streetcar pass, or for several different devices to connect to the same WiFi network *and* have GPS running to obtain a precise location to force an update.

If I could pass a manual location to Backitude, then it would put that exact location in Latitude when I am connected to the WiFi network.

*Basically I do getlocation, then set %LATLON to %LOCN when I am out and about. When I am connected to WiFi, I set %LATLON to specific coordinates, eg. 10.000,-1.1000.

getWeather then uses %LATLON

getLocation then uses %LATLON

so *my* information always reflects my exact location. But Backitude will only steal when %LOCN is changed, so when on WiFi it uses what Google *thinks* is my location, based on their WiFi geolocation databases.

Hope that makes sense :)

[Rich D]

> Hope that makes sense :)

Yup, makes perfect sense.  I am just starting to try out the apps you mentioned.  Not looking good so far. As usual google is more geared towards the social end of things then anything else.. I did see one thing so far that was a little concerning.  It stated. To "TRY" and figure out where and what I am doing the location history will access  'sensors on the device'  I did not know that...  I hope this is data that is already available and they are not using extra juice to get this info...
I also found that my location history was already turned on.. I do not know if it is on by default or I set it on when i first checked out latitude a long time back.. not sure how much battery that's been sucking up this whole time... it sounds very conservative though, I never have wifi enabled so I can't imagine it would have been a big drain..

Thanks again,    Rich..

[Dave Fisher]

> I also found that my location history was already turned on.. I do not know if it is on by default or I set it on when i first checked

> out latitude a long time back.. not sure how much battery that's been sucking up this whole time... it sounds very conservative

> though, I never have wifi enabled so I can't imagine it would have been a big drain..

Bzzzt! Google Maps and Google Latitude are two of the worst offenders for battery drain! If you are not interested in Google Latitude, then disable it entirely. Maps will still sit there in the background grabbing all kinds of information about your surroundings, and feeding it back to Google (to help them improve their geolocation data), which you can only disable by turning off the option in Location Settings on your phone.

I personally leave that all on, but disable Maps from running unless *I* want it to, using Autorun Manager from Google Play. Take a look at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=29420959&postcount=7059 for information on stopping Maps from auto running, there is more info in the thread but its HUGE and I can't find the specific post on Autorun Manager now! Just be aware if you change things you may mess up your location detection, so do a little at a time and be prepared for potential "gaps" in your data while you suss it out.

As for being geared to the social side, well it is if thats how you use it. Personally I only use latitude for the history. Its pretty useless, but I like pointless stats :) It has been useful in the past when I wanted to know what and when I left places - as I also have Tasker do an update when I connect/disconnect from known WiFi networks, it was easy to see the exact time I left.

For your use of logging waypoints however, it would be pretty useless - the Google Contacts is quite a neat idea for that!

[Rich D]

> Bzzzt! Google Maps and Google Latitude are two of the worst offenders for battery drain!

Thanks for the buzzer alert.. :)

I personally leave that all on, but disable Maps from running unless *I* want it to, using Autorun Manager from Google Play. Take a look at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=29420959&postcount=7059 for information on stopping Maps

Nice tip, I will give it a good read..

> For your use of logging waypoints however, it would be pretty useless - the Google Contacts is quite a neat idea for that!

Ahhh, that's actually the advice I was looking for... That's the way it was looking but thanks for confirming ..

This is very enlightening,    thanks alot...  Rich

[Rich D]

the Google Contacts is quite a neat idea for that!

Just for clarity if others try this approach. As usual google always falls a little short..  if you do a search with google maps the found point can be saved to contacts by a menu / save to contacts.  This is not the case if you are viewing the map and press on a location( this did work in earlier versions).  The save to contacts is not available .. It can however be 'shared'  so i made a simple task with 'autoshare' and tasker 'open map' that will reopen google maps with that location as a search result.. then you can save it to contacts..

Rich..