Jump to content

Waymarking mobile - beta


ChileHead

Recommended Posts

I have put together a mobile optimized version of Waymarking.com that should work on most smart phones. I've tested with Android and iOS (a little) and it "basically" works. It needs some polishing and testing though.

 

This has been done with the permission of Groundspeak.

 

Go here with your mobile browser to try it out. The first time you use it you should get a popup asking if your location can be shared. Say yes, otherwise - what's the point! :rolleyes: This is a temporary location until I guage the level of interest. Any problems or issues, feel free to email me or post here.

 

http://www.chilehead.us/wm

 

(edit: added an alias for "wm" to "Waymarking" because the forums here kept changing the case of Waymarking to an uppercase w)

 

Features:

- search from current location, showing all waymarks or filtering out those you have already logged or own

 

- visit a waymark, entering a log and optional photo (note: you cannot enter the additional "missing" information if the waymark is asking for it.)

 

- add a new waymark using the current location

 

- "like" a waymark for facebook integration (this might stay, might go ...)

 

Known issues:

- There are occasionally problems on Android devices where after you select the picture you go back to the splash page. Your visit should still be there, but the picture will not. This seems to be a problem on older android devices (like mine), but I couldn't recreate it on a newer phone.

 

- Using the stock Android browser, when you select a photo you are only given the option to choose an existing photo, not take a new one. Using a different browser like Dolphin corrects this. This is not a problem on iOS.

 

- I believe selecting a photo only works on iOS 6.0 and later

 

- I've had a few problems adding waymarks, still debugging that.

 

Coming "soon"

- navigation to waymarks (which would be done similar to what I do with www.intercaching.com if you are familiar with that, also another "beta" product.)

 

- ability to upload more than 1 photo for visits or waymark creation

 

- specify a category when creating a waymark

 

- choose an existing photo on your phone and have a waymark created from it using the coordinate information embedded in the photo

 

- optionally post to your facebook feed that you logged a waymark ... a check-in type feature like foursquare

 

Note: images below were captured from my desktop, which is why the accuracy shows as pretty high. In practice, if you are outdoors, your GPS readings should be much better.

 

Splash page:

Fahy3JV.png

 

-----------------------

 

Search page:

eOVEuXD.png

 

-----------------------

 

Waymark details page:

RybXp1I.png

HOT7u95.png

 

-----------------------

 

Add waymark page:

IkzfW9q.png

Edited by ChileHead
Link to comment

Ok looks fine! I just took a quick view on it. It seems to work.

 

Just a little thing:

Both buttons on top lead to the nearest Waymarks. I have no possibility to filter my finds.

 

I will do more tests.

 

I used Android 4

 

Make sure you sign in through the app and it should filter your finds out.

Link to comment

Ok looks fine! I just took a quick view on it. It seems to work.

 

Just a little thing:

Both buttons on top lead to the nearest Waymarks. I have no possibility to filter my finds.

 

I will do more tests.

 

I used Android 4

 

Make sure you sign in through the app and it should filter your finds out.

 

Yup. Right now the splash page doesn't know if you are logged in or not. Once you click one of the buttons, you'll see at top if you are logged in - if not, both results are the same. I'll probably add something to the splash page to indicate if you are logged in and disable the button that filters if you are not.

 

You are logging into Waymarking.com through my site acting as a proxy, so even if you are logged in to the site on your phone my site won't know that.

Link to comment

Sorry but I still don't have a possibility to filter. The first and the second button bring both up the site with the nearest Waymarks but no possibility to filter.

 

Surely I'm logged in.

 

When you get the list of waymarks, what does it say at the top right? You have to login to your Waymarking account using my app - doesn't matter if you are logged in through your local PC or phone.

Link to comment

Works great. But :)

 

1) For some reason the login is not remembered, soon I have to shorten my password to just "psw"

2) Search page ends in text:

"Fatal error: Call to a member function childNodes() on a non-object in

/home/content/t/i/m/timdthomas/html/Waymarking/wmlist.php on line 62

"

This is shown after a certain waymark both when I'm logged in and not. So the next waymark may be the culprit?

Link to comment

Works mostly great! I especially like the mobile friendly formatting.

 

I got the same error message mentionned by stebu and non-english characters are messed up. Waymarking.com uses UTF-8, your site displays it as ISO 8859-1; this does not work well together.

 

But that is just usual beta hickup; nothing to worry about.

Link to comment

1) For some reason the login is not remembered, soon I have to shorten my password to just "psw"

 

Do you mean from page to page it doesn't remember who you are? Or after a short time? You're sure it successfully logged you in (from the search results, your name was at the top right?)

 

2) Search page ends in text:

"Fatal error: Call to a member function childNodes() on a non-object in

/home/content/t/i/m/timdthomas/html/Waymarking/wmlist.php on line 62

"

This is shown after a certain waymark both when I'm logged in and not. So the next waymark may be the culprit?

 

Yeah, I've seen that a few times. I think there are results that I'm not expecting when I get the list of waymarks from Waymarking.com. Do you happen to know what the coordinates were when you searched? If you could cut & paste the URL in your browser when this happens that would help.

 

I haven't been able to reproduce it since I've seen it before.

Link to comment

1) For some reason the login is not remembered, soon I have to shorten my password to just "psw"

Do you mean from page to page it doesn't remember who you are? Or after a short time? You're sure it successfully logged you in (from the search results, your name was at the top right?)

2) Search page ends in text:

"Fatal error: Call to a member function childNodes() on a non-object in

/home/content/t/i/m/timdthomas/html/Waymarking/wmlist.php on line 62"

This is shown after a certain waymark both when I'm logged in and not. So the next waymark may be the culprit?

Yeah, I've seen that a few times. I think there are results that I'm not expecting when I get the list of waymarks from Waymarking.com. Do you happen to know what the coordinates were when you searched? If you could cut & paste the URL in your browser when this happens that would help.

I haven't been able to reproduce it since I've seen it before.

1) The site forgets me when I re-enter the site after some time (10s of minutes)

2) Oh, it occurs on my PC browser, too. Makes the copying much easier:

http://chilehead.us/Waymarking/wmlist.php?lat=60.26167&lon=24.85705&filter=0

This waymark is the last one displayed:

http://www.Waymarking.com/waymarks/WMA37K_Hesburger_Pukinmki_Helsinki_Finland

Link to comment

1) The site forgets me when I re-enter the site after some time (10s of minutes)

 

I'll check what the session timeout is. It should stay longer than 10s of minutes.

 

2) Oh, it occurs on my PC browser, too. Makes the copying much easier:

http://chilehead.us/Waymarking/wmlist.php?lat=60.26167&lon=24.85705&filter=0

This waymark is the last one displayed:

http://www.Waymarking.com/waymarks/WMA37K_Hesburger_Pukinmki_Helsinki_Finland

 

Cool - that helps a lot. Looks like the problem is when a waymark doesn't have an image in the search results, the 11th one down in this search:

http://www.Waymarking.com/wm/search.aspx?f=1&lat=60.26812&lon=24.86672&t=6&gid=3

Link to comment

2) Search page ends in text:

"Fatal error: Call to a member function childNodes() on a non-object in

/home/content/t/i/m/timdthomas/html/Waymarking/wmlist.php on line 62

"

This is shown after a certain waymark both when I'm logged in and not. So the next waymark may be the culprit?

 

This should be fixed now. I don't know why some waymarks don't have an image displayed in their search results, but this was the cause.

Link to comment

I got the same error message mentionned by stebu and non-english characters are messed up. Waymarking.com uses UTF-8, your site displays it as ISO 8859-1; this does not work well together.

 

The UTF-8 problem should be fixed now, at least on the search page. I didn't see it anywhere else in my brief check. I spent years doing internationalization at my paying job, and you would have thought I would have at least tested that out first! (and yes, preferences for English/metric will come soon too)

Link to comment

1) The site forgets me when I re-enter the site after some time (10s of minutes)

I'll check what the session timeout is. It should stay longer than 10s of minutes.

The "fatal error" has been fixed, now I can see the whole waymark list.

 

Login session duration is a bit odd? I have an Android 2.2 phone and I am using the default browser.

 

On the phone:

-the full website remembers my previous login

-the mobile website does not remember

 

On my PC (win7, Chrome) both sites keep me logged in at least for hours.

 

Maybe it's the default browser?

Link to comment

On the phone:

-the full website remembers my previous login

-the mobile website does not remember

 

I'll have to poke some more. I'm still logged into the mobile site, after at least 10 hours since I used it. I'm not sure if logging in/out of the full site ends up invalidating your session on the mobile site.

Link to comment

The new layout looks better.

 

Thanks. The other one looked a little clunky, this presentation looks cleaner. I didn't like my icons anyway.

 

I just tried another test. The posting of a new Waymark worked. Maybe a new way to post.

 

More tests will follow.

 

Thanks for trying it out. I plan on using it to initially create most of my waymarks. I'm holding off on whether the mobile app will actually let you fill in all the details and submit for review. The problem with that is we'd end up with a lot of descriptions that are minimalistic, such as "Look at the nice waterfall." I don't mind short logs for visits, but would rather have people spend a little time on the writeup, which they likely won't do on the phone.

Link to comment

...

Thanks for trying it out. I plan on using it to initially create most of my waymarks. I'm holding off on whether the mobile app will actually let you fill in all the details and submit for review. The problem with that is we'd end up with a lot of descriptions that are minimalistic, such as "Look at the nice waterfall." I don't mind short logs for visits, but would rather have people spend a little time on the writeup, which they likely won't do on the phone.

I fully agree, there are some wonderfully detailed descriptions on the subject. Especially abroad I appreciate lengthy descriptions that are not feasible from a phone.

Being a nooby I just wonder, isn't it possible to edit the description once you get to a real keyboard?

Link to comment

...

Thanks for trying it out. I plan on using it to initially create most of my waymarks. I'm holding off on whether the mobile app will actually let you fill in all the details and submit for review. The problem with that is we'd end up with a lot of descriptions that are minimalistic, such as "Look at the nice waterfall." I don't mind short logs for visits, but would rather have people spend a little time on the writeup, which they likely won't do on the phone.

I fully agree, there are some wonderfully detailed descriptions on the subject. Especially abroad I appreciate lengthy descriptions that are not feasible from a phone.

Being a nooby I just wonder, isn't it possible to edit the description once you get to a real keyboard?

 

I agree. I think it should save the waymark as an unfinished waymark to be completed later when fuller details can filled in. I often use the unfinished waymarks to save a waymark while I am looking for information to fill it in. This especially true when I know I have seen more information but just seem to find it.

Link to comment

I agree. I think it should save the waymark as an unfinished waymark to be completed later when fuller details can filled in. I often use the unfinished waymarks to save a waymark while I am looking for information to fill it in. This especially true when I know I have seen more information but just seem to find it.

 

OK, from the sounds of it people are thinking like I am. Use the phone app just to mark and upload the photo, save the waymark as an uncategorized waymark, and finish later at a desktop/laptop.

Link to comment

How useful would people find navigation to the waymark?

 

I'm in the middle of putting this in place. Arrow rotates as you walk and points you in the right direction. Though I don't know if I can get access to a phone's digital compass so the arrow will only point the right way when you are moving.

 

0B9quES.png

Link to comment

How useful would people find navigation to the waymark?

 

I'm in the middle of putting this in place. Arrow rotates as you walk and points you in the right direction. Though I don't know if I can get access to a phone's digital compass so the arrow will only point the right way when you are moving.

 

0B9quES.png

 

This is one feature I really look forward to.

Link to comment

I agree. I think it should save the waymark as an unfinished waymark to be completed later when fuller details can filled in. I often use the unfinished waymarks to save a waymark while I am looking for information to fill it in. This especially true when I know I have seen more information but just seem to find it.

 

OK, from the sounds of it people are thinking like I am. Use the phone app just to mark and upload the photo, save the waymark as an uncategorized waymark, and finish later at a desktop/laptop.

 

It would be good if the category could be selected, just save it as unfinished.

Link to comment

How useful would people find navigation to the waymark?

 

I'm in the middle of putting this in place. Arrow rotates as you walk and points you in the right direction. Though I don't know if I can get access to a phone's digital compass so the arrow will only point the right way when you are moving.

 

0B9quES.png

 

This is one feature I really look forward to.

 

I agree with Bruce on this. I would definitely use this feature. It can be really frustrating to go to a new city and basically "fly blind" with respect to existing waymarks. Too often, I've returned home, only to find that a waymark, in a category I haven't visited yet, was very nearby where I was, but I had no idea. Especially, when it's a foreign city that I may never visit again. It would be great to know what is around, where ever I am with my phone.

 

As far as publishing waymarks, I can see the benefit to using it to the point of making an unfinished waymark. I'd really rather spend my time seeing what's out there and taking pictures and not worry about all the "adminstrative" stuff in the field.

 

Awesome work!

Link to comment

I cant get a photo to upload from my phone, either in the field or at home connected to wifi. I tried the regular Waymarking site too, I received the error message saying my photo was not a jpg file. I tried the navigation wile I stood in the church parking lot. It seems to lag but if you said it works better when driving then it makes sense why it was clunky

Link to comment

  • Added units preferences for my Canadian friends (that's a joke - it's for everybody except the US as we are still stuck on the antiquated imperial measurement system!)
  • Reformatted waymark display page a bit
  • Added links to nearby waymarks on each waymark page
  • Played with the session timeout, not sure if it's fixed though

Link to comment

The login problem still persist. I'll try it with some other browser, if my phone can handle one.

 

About the metric/imperial selection, isn't this unnecessary? When I'm logged in, I think that Waymarking site sends the distances with the correct units on the waymark listing page. Couldn't your site pick km/mi from the list and use that as the metric/imperial setting throughout?

Link to comment

The login problem still persist. I'll try it with some other browser, if my phone can handle one.

 

Hmm ... I've logged in all day. I don't think I've logged in since last night. Wonder if this is a phone/OS specific issue, though I wouldn't see why.

 

About the metric/imperial selection, isn't this unnecessary? When I'm logged in, I think that Waymarking site sends the distances with the correct units on the waymark listing page. Couldn't your site pick km/mi from the list and use that as the metric/imperial setting throughout?

 

Yes and no. If you aren't logged in then it defaults to metric - this allows you to change it if you don't want to log in. On the splash page, I actually don't know yet if you're logged into Waymarking but units are displayed there. I suppose when I find out if you are logged in I could use the units specified on the account, otherwise use the preference set.

Link to comment

Ok one problem happened while posting a new Waymark today. The title, the description and the coordinates have been posted into a new one. And the picture has been posted into another one. This worked fine last Friday.

 

Maybe this happened because I have changed to the camera of my phone between saving the Waymark and loading up the picture. Maybe this wasn't a good idea.

 

That shouldn't be a problem, but I can try this some more as well.

 

One other thing happened both times. The coordinates have changed to W instead of E.

This might be the well known E-W-Bug at Waymarking.

 

I'm not aware of the EW bug on Waymarking. What's the bug with that?

Link to comment

 

I'm not aware of the EW bug on Waymarking. What's the bug with that?

There is a problem on the website keeping South and East on waymarks when they are selected. The website reverts these back North and West after only a short time. When I was doing my New Zealand waymarks I found the best practice was to set these immediately before I clicked save.

Link to comment

A completly different but very important question:

How do you manage my personal data??

 

Do you save my login and password?

Where do you save them? Locally on my phone or at your webserver?

Is these data save?

Are you able to read my password?

 

Please write some words about this questions!

 

Good question.

 

Geocaching.com has an API that allows secure authentication. Unfortunately this cannot be used with Waymarking at this time.

 

Your username/password is sent to my server, but is never stored locally in any file or database. It is used to login to Waymarking.com and I store a cookie file as part of your session between Waymarking.com and my server.

Link to comment

I don't know what you have changed since Friday at the picture upload. but it does not work anymore for me.

I tested three times. Allways the same!

 

I use Andoid 4.1.2

 

I just created one without a problem - the picture uploaded to the right location. I'll try it out again tonight. Nothing should have changed since Friday with the picture upload.

 

Which browser do you use? I'm still on an older version of Android (2.3.4), though I plan on upgrading in the next two weeks. There is possibly a browser issue here.

 

I haven't tried with other browsers like Dolphin or Firefox (Chrome doesn't run on my older phone) so I can try those.

 

By chance are you switching browsers unknowingly between the pages? I have Dolphin running on my phone but don't generally use it, but have noticed when I do it sets itself up as the browser for certain pages. So I'll be in the stock browser, click a link and have the other browser launch. If this happens, the sessions between the browser are different and I'm not sure what would happen.

 

From what you've said, this would match this problem so just double check which browser you are running when you create the waymark, and which one you are using when the photo is uploaded. It might be switching without you knowing, but this scenario seems somewhat unlikely.

Link to comment

A completly different but very important question:

How do you manage my personal data??

 

Do you save my login and password?

Where do you save them? Locally on my phone or at your webserver?

Is these data save?

Are you able to read my password?

 

Please write some words about this questions!

 

Good question.

 

Geocaching.com has an API that allows secure authentication. Unfortunately this cannot be used with Waymarking at this time.

 

Your username/password is sent to my server, but is never stored locally in any file or database. It is used to login to Waymarking.com and I store a cookie file as part of your session between Waymarking.com and my server.

 

Followup ... I do add to a debug log your username just for tracking usage, but the password is NEVER written out to a log or disk. It's simply a pass through.

 

If this sort of app becomes popular, I would want to push GS to expand the API to include Waymarking queries, which should satisfy any concern about security (plus make the app more stable as it wouldn't have to scrape.)

Link to comment

I did create one with the Dolphin browser and the picture uploaded properly.

 

There is an outstanding issue with Android where after selecting the picture the page sometimes refreshes, which loses what picture was selected. I've seen this if I go to the Waymarking.com site on my phone and try the same thing, so this particular error isn't specific to my app. At this point an error is generated and I silently take you back to the home page. I'll put in a different page to catch this error to see if this is what you are seeing. It doesn't always happen, but happens often enough.

 

I have not seen this on iOS so far. Though this doesn't work at all on versions older than iOS 6 because Apple didn't support file upload through the browser.

 

Tante.Hossi - after you select/take your picture, does the page refresh and take you back to the home screen, or are you given the opportunity to select the Submit button after the picture has been selected?

Link to comment

Thanks for your explanations about the security and how the password is stored (or not)!

 

I hope GS will make a WM-API sometime! :blink:

 

Yup, that would be much easier.

 

One of the things I'm responsible for in my paying job is writing the software that sits on millions of devices that send usage data daily to our servers. I'm sensitive to PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in the software I wrote for both the client and server; meaning, I can't log or send names, passwords, usernames, addresses, phone numbers, etc ... So I'm trying to do the same here as much as possible (I'll probably remove the logging of usernames too.)

Link to comment

This looks great! I can't wait to use it!

 

One thing that I don't think I see that might be useful, would be to have an option to ignore waypoints that are in a category you have already logged. So if I have logged a McDonalds in the past, to ask this not to locate every other McDonald in my vicinity. Of course, if the next McDonalds was also a waypoint in another category, like Freestanding Arches, and you haven't logged that yet, it should show up for that.

 

Given that I only have one total waypoint log so far, it doesn't really affect me much at the moment, but I think that would help people trying to fill in their grid.

Link to comment

This looks great! I can't wait to use it!

 

One thing that I don't think I see that might be useful, would be to have an option to ignore waypoints that are in a category you have already logged. So if I have logged a McDonalds in the past, to ask this not to locate every other McDonald in my vicinity. Of course, if the next McDonalds was also a waypoint in another category, like Freestanding Arches, and you haven't logged that yet, it should show up for that.

 

Given that I only have one total waypoint log so far, it doesn't really affect me much at the moment, but I think that would help people trying to fill in their grid.

 

I'm not sure I have a way of making the query to Waymarking to do that. If there is a way of doing that through the normal site I could probably do it through the mobile site, but if the core site doesn't support it then I don't think I can.

 

It would be a nice thing to have, as I've often thought about that when out and about to try and fill my grid.

Link to comment

I decided that I needed to try this mobile version because I want to get into Waymarking and I lean heavily on mobile devices for all of my location based activities. However, it states that "Geolocation permission not given for use of geolocation." I can't pinpoint my location when I search.

 

Is there something I'm missing?

 

Depending on your phone, there is a setting somewhere to allow/disallow sites to use the geolocation functionality. You'll have to turn that on.

Link to comment

There is now a new link on the waymark page to allow you to view the waymark in google maps.

 

- on Android, this will open the native google maps application, and then you can navigate to the waymark using turn by turn directions.

 

- on iOS, this *should* open the google maps application as well, if installed. I don't have an iOS device, and I tried with my daughter's and it opened google maps in Safari because she doesn't have that app installed.

Link to comment

There is now a new link on the waymark page to allow you to view the waymark in google maps.

 

- on Android, this will open the native google maps application, and then you can navigate to the waymark using turn by turn directions.

 

- on iOS, this *should* open the google maps application as well, if installed. I don't have an iOS device, and I tried with my daughter's and it opened google maps in Safari because she doesn't have that app installed.

 

I just tried it on my iPhone 4S. It opened the Google maps application and was able to generate directions. Thank you for doing all this work.

Link to comment

Just found this.

 

Looks pretty cool! I'll try it out, and see how it works.

 

Meanwhile, as I saw you were considering Facebook "Like" integration, don't forget about Pinterest? Waymarking ends up being a lot about photos, so Pinterest seems like a natural.

 

Just a thought.

 

Thanks for your work!

Link to comment

I was really happy to have this app while in Florida recently. It helped me find several waymarks besides those I loaded into my Oregon 400 along with the geocaches. I am using an iPhone 4S with the current operating system.

 

The app allowed me to learn more about Waymarking in that I used it to initially create some waymarks. That meant I got to learn how to create the posting from that part of the web page after I returned home.

 

One question is whether one can go to a second page when looking for nearby waymarks. I was in a waymark dense area and trying to plan my next move but could not figure out how to do it at the time.

Link to comment

There is now a new link on the waymark page to allow you to view the waymark in google maps.

 

- on Android, this will open the native google maps application, and then you can navigate to the waymark using turn by turn directions.

 

- on iOS, this *should* open the google maps application as well, if installed. I don't have an iOS device, and I tried with my daughter's and it opened google maps in Safari because she doesn't have that app installed.

I tried this on Android and iOs and it works fine the way it is designed. BUT... maybe not the way you would expect.

 

Google maps does internally not work with coordinates; it has a huge database with billions of waypoints, usually along roads. When you feed it a coordinate, the location will be mapped to the closest waypoint found in the database.

 

This works fine in urban areas and along roads, you will not miss any McDonald's. When you are looking for something in the wilderness, Google Maps can send you miles away from where you wanted to go, i.e. the closest road from there.

 

This is not a bug and there is nothing anyone could do about it; the Google Maps was simply not designed to be used off-road.

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...