Mátra 115 Community Ultra Trail

We spent this nice weekend supporting the Mátra 115 trail with online result lists. This trail is a quite long-distance community event, 115 kms, in the Mátra mountain, Hungary.

We made some experiments as part of the online coverage: we gave a few cheap mobile GPS devices with GPRS capabilities to some participants. The next figure is a snapshot of the path with two participants on the way:



My experiments:

• actually, it IS possible to share locations online with low costs; the gps device costs around 100 USD, and woophoo is now suitable to recieve data and to provide visualization,


• cheap devices seem to work well; however, there are some drawbacks:
• we have selected two devices, that can send location data only in every 10th second as the most frequent sample,


• there are some mysterious data losses on the tracks; we haven't tested the devices carefully enough to know, if there were GPS, GSM signal losses or other problems,


• the capacity of the batteries are not the best, the units we used seem to work for about 6-8 hours under low GSM signal; however, batteries are replacable, and we can also change them for better quality ones, they are standard,


• the functionality of such a device is limited; eg. our devices have some buttons, but they are useless; they can not be configured to be used for beginning and finishing a track (the rich function set of the Woophoo Java client makes me maybe a bit critical).


• It is however a great fun to track long-distance racers online using this setup.
  

If I'll have some spare time, I'll give a detailed description on how to set up such a device and tracking environment.

New features coming

For some time past we deployed only smaller enhancements and bug fixes. However, some more interesting new features are under testing or development, and will be deployed soon. These include

• POI handling (importing, defining, querying and using POIs),
• new client - that is actually downloadable as the unstable client; the new version uses a more reliable new mapping library and has some new features.
• Since trying out the client is quite complicated, we will make the process simpler: the client app will be integrated in the webpage, as an embedded Java application. The client has a rich feature set, and it would be nice to be able to try them out easily (especially while it has some features that the website has not).
• Our main goal is still a good traffic map visualization - we are working on a newer, efficient algorithm with good prediction abilities.
• We are considering a slight design and functional change of the web site; we already have a (probably) good concept in our mind, that have to be tested a bit.
• Web site functionality is evolving contiunally. Some basic features under development are track media modification and deletion, track editing functionality, track-group statistical functions, user-user connections (friends), openid integration, gpx import/export etc.

Briefly, new features coming out continually, with some more noticeable very soon. Stay tuned, and use our community place to influence our priorities - as mainly developers, we do not always choose the best priorities. However, we know ourselfs, and are hence suggestible :)

Woophoo outage

We appologize for woophoo.com is not beeing available for a little time, we had a problem caused by our ISP. We identified and fixed it, woophoo.com is available again - however, nameservers have to follow up the change, so it can happen that woophoo.com seems to be down for a further short time, sorry again, we tried our best to keep the downtime minimal.

Woophoo Client 1.0.4

The upload of the client version 1.0.4 to the Woophoo server is currently running. 271Megs (2 languages, 225 devices, 900 files) so I have some time to write about the new release:

Predictably under the beta test: this is a 'pull yourself together' release which means that the main focus was on usability: We added only essential functionalities but a lot of usability improvements:

• Context sensitive help
• Welcome screen at the first start with basic information about Woophoo, the technical requirements and internet costs.
• Place search functionality which should be the first implemented feature in a mapping application. It's done by using the Open Street Map Name Finder - a good starting point with nice syntax like 'main st, new york' or 'restaurants, budapest'. Integration with local search providers and 'near me' search is coming in the next release.
  
  
  
  
  
• Heads Up Display (HUD) with speed, current time and arrival time - (The truth is that this is an On Screen Display (OSD) but the name HUD is much more hotter. Sorry for that...)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The HUD wants to be unobtrusive: It is translucent and comes up automatically if you don't touch the phone for a while but hides when you press a key. It moves on the screen so that it always tries to shadow the least interesting map areas. The info on the HUD and its behavior will be configurable in the next version.
  
• Some minor improvements like 'loading...' alerts, icons on the vehicle selection screen, better command priorities in the menus, better and safer settings page (no more password on the screen when you lost the phone - however no stars while you enter the password), distance information on the bunch page and the most important: screen transition effects.

That's it. We need at least one more run to achieve a really viable state but this one is a huge step that way. Try it!

First steps of chat

Have you ever seen the new 'Chat' item in the client menu? Yes, we implemented Jabber instant messaging to allow chat not only between Woophoo users but towards outer space too.

Jabber had ca. 90 million users in 2007, (according to Wikipedia, based on the calculations of Process-One) but if you have a Gmail account you are one of them, because GTalk - the chat at the left of Gmail - uses jabber too.

That's nice, but you have at least three IM accounts and maybe you don't want to have a fourth one at Woophoo. A solution to this problem is that you could log in into your favorite IM account using the Woophoo client. We are working on this! Notice that not only technical difficulties are in the process but our constant will is to protect your privacy: we just don't want to know your IM account.

Experimental Traffic Map

One of the main goals of Woophoo is to provide traffic maps. The task is quite simple: visualize current traffic situation on a map, to enable proper routing decisions. 

We use anonimised measurements provided by Woophoo users as input information - this can be directly used for visualization, or, if we do not have up-to-date information of a given area, we can try inferring, predicting current situation based on historical data of the given area. A lots of algorithms can be used both for prediction and for visualization, including data mining and knowledge discovery algorithms. However, we have to present a scalable method, that can provide fast answers for lots of concurrent users asking for maps of different areas.

Our new, experimental traffic map service produces something like the next figure, which is the current traffic map of Budapest.

The map is available both on client side and on the web site, however, Woophoo users currently provide data mostly only for Hungary. Color codes refer to the average car speed of the area, the strength of coloring relates to the accuracy of the prediction. The speed is relative, red indicates deceleration against the average speed of a given user on a given route. I personally prefer this kind of speed values, because it blures driving skill differences. Accuracy basicly depends on the user activity of Budapest; if we have more accurate data, then we can infer the current situation more precisely. 

Keep in mind, that as a prototype service, we keep on developing both prediction and visualization - new visualization techniques, better prediction algorithms are expected. And, of course, to have proper maps, keep on using Woophoo - if more and more use Woophoo, traffic maps become more and more accurate.

Woophoo Beta

I'm glad to introduce: Woophoo Beta! 

According to our schedule, we made some major enhancements, fixed bugs, wrote documentation, completed initial tests, designed pages etc. -- and we found, that Woophoo is the best integrated GPS service and tool-set available today for free, and is ready to open up.

To summarize, Woophoo can currently provide reliable 

• traditional map-based navigation,
• GPS vehicle or personal tracking,
• buddy tracking (fleets),
• chat (via Jabber),
• route planning (via OpenStreetMap Gosmore),
• traffic map

on the mobile client side, and

• interface to handle tracks, track statistics, comments, tags, 
• search interfaces for tracks,
• interface to handle and administer bunches (fleets),
• bunch tracking,
• traffic map,
• interface to embed bunches, tracks in foreign web pages

on the web side, and there are are lots of fancy new features under development.

The main goal of the beta stage is to test and enhance the services and tools while they are public and open. We tried our best to make Woophoo useful and comfortable - now we need feedback from independent users. If you find a bug, have a feature request or just want to contact us, you can 

• leave a comment on this blog,
  
• visit Woophoo Agora,
• or write an email.

Try it, use it, and don't hesitate to write feature requests, bug reports or general comments.

Attach images to your tracks!

If you want to document a moving event like the Critical Mass, or you just want to have a sweet memory of your trip, it's a good idea to attach photos to your track.

Here is the track of Critical Mass Budapest on 22 September, 2008:



To attach photos to a track, first you must upload them somewhere on the internet because we don't store images. Just upload them to your favorite image sharing site! Our favorite is Picasa so we have nice integration with it but you can attach any images available on the internet to your tracks.

So simply click the "Attach Picasa image to this track" or the "Attach image from URL to this track" link to start the attaching process. A new window opens up and you can select the image to attach (by entering the url of the image, or by selecting it from your Picasa albums). You must point at the location where you took this photo. It's easy to use our location selection tool: If you move the mouse over the map, an arrow follows it on the track. The arrow never leaves the track, it is always at the nearest point to the mouse so you don't need to click a precise location on the track. If you see that the arrow is at the place where the photo is taken, just click on the map and the location will be selected.
Of course you can add a comment to the image if you want.




Note: Please consider the copyrights when attaching images from the internet. All the images attached to our sample tracks are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Beta test in two weeks!

Big news: Beta test starts on October 20!

Beta test is not just a fashionable label on the logo. It means that Woophoo isn't perfect but usable now, and we need your help to improve it.

Why participate in the test? Because Woophoo is in its current state one of the best free gps trackers on the Earth.

Note that you don't even need to wait for the beta if you want to try Woophoo. Woophoo is up now, you can jump in!

Woophoo client 0.9 is out!

It makes me very happy to introduce version 0.9 of the Woophoo client which is the last feature release before the beta test.
There are some shiny features and a lot of usability improvements in this release so let us take a look at the highlights:

• Redesigned menu system
  The main menu is less fancy but more usable now. There is no separated map-menu so if you press the menu button on the map you will get to the main menu. The main menu has two columns for faster access and we throw out the icons because they used a lot of space on the display. I personally think that icon-based menus are less usable anyway.
  
  
• State icons on the map display
  Small icons indicate the state of the software on the top-right corner. You can see if the tracking is active, if your fleet is visible, and the vehicle you use.
• Notifying system
  We added a little notifier to the map, similar to the one on the site: it notifies you about every event in the client. It shows events like "loading you bunch" and errors like "cannot log in". We hope that it can shorten the learning curve of the key mapping too.
  
• Experimental route planning
  We integrated the client with the Open Street Map based route planner at http://yournavigation.org.
  
  You can generate a route plan by pressing '6' on the map if you specified a destination. The route plan is displayed as a simple blue trackline yet. You can redesign the plan by pressing '6' twice. (The first press hides the plan, the second loads a new one)
  
  Note that this feature is experimental now, we just want to see the usability of the OSM-based route planning. If we found it usable we will enhance the look-and-feel and start our own route planner server.
  

You can download the client from the Woophoo site or using this direct link: http://woophoo.com/d