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 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!

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.

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

Woophoo blog launched

This blog is set up in conjunction with woophoo.com. We will discuss new releases, features, bugs and all related topics. The main goal is to inform all of our users and everyone interested in Woophoo.

Feel free to comment.