Google Latitude on iOS 4 update

Now don’t get me wrong Latitudie does what it says on the tin, but boy…does it drain the battery. I also found that the only way to turn it off was to stop the background app from running, and then disable the location service for it.

The setting I used for background were, Best location, periodic updates when not moving…off. With these settings, a full battery would last around 8 hours on my iPhone 4, and around 6 hours on C’s 3GS.

Now suprisingly I would have expected to App store to be over saturated with Google latatide apps, however I could only find one other, called Device Locator.

Device Locator like Latitudie will track your position, and update the latitude servers, however does so much more.

You initially need to create an account on the Device Locators site, download the app, sign into the app, then your good to setup.

Via the website you can configure how you want your phone to update. The range is as follows

Cell Tower Switch
2 Hours
1 Hour
30 mins
10 mins
1 min (emergency)

Now I’ve been running at the 10 minute interval update, and it’s hardly touching my battery, my battery was fully charged at 8am this morning, and when I write this 3 hours later, my battery is on 99%, which is a vast improvement over Latitudie, this would normally be in the low 80%.

The website also give you a small google maps preview showing you currently location of device, and a history down the left hand side. There is even a graph to tell you how much battery you had at the last poll.

There is also the option to send a text message to your phone (if somebody has swiped it), or set the alarm going (assuming you can’t find your phone).

Now granted, this app is £2.99 however it’s a small price to pay in comparison to the mobileme account which does a very similar job. Judging by the website, this is still in the very early stages (no css on the site as yet), however it works very well.

Tags: 10 mins, 3gs, apps, cell tower, comparison, configure, Download, drain, emergency, google, google maps, graph, iphone, iphone 4, job, last poll, latitude, left hand side, location, location service, Locator, Locators, minute interval, mobileme, option, periodic updates, phone, poll, servers, sign, store, switch, text, text message, tin, Via

Google Latitude on iOS 4

As you may remember from my post on iOS 4, I was looking forward to somebody developing a Google Latitude application.

Google Latitude is a way of keeping your friends updated on your location in real time. If you have a latitude application running on your mobile device, this will poll the Google servers and update your location. This is especially handy if you are meeting with friends, or want to see if somebody is home before popping in.

Google Latitude has been working as a layer on Google Map on the Nokia, Blackberry and Android based phones for some time now, however only worked as a HTML5 version on the iPhone (which doesn’t work as a background application)

Now thanks to the Background location feature on iOS 4, and Google making the Latitude API’s available, developers are able to start work on Location based applications.

The first one that seems to have emerged is an app called Latitudie.

Latitudie is still in it’s infancy stage, (Current version is 1.1) however seems to do the job. Once signed in, it will pinpoint your location on the map and start to poll the Google Latitude server. You then have to option to view your history, and thanks to  iOS 4 it will happily run in the background.

In version 1.0, the application tended to not update at all if your didn’t move locations, which would lead others to think you had the application switch off, also the accuracy would drop, making it look like you were in the middle of a field, and not at home.

In version 1.1 the developer has addressed these issues by allowing you to switch on/off “Low accuracy in background” and an additional feature of “Periodic updates” (when low accuracy in background is switched off).

As I’ve said, it’s still in it’s infancy stages, doesn’t allow you to view your friends on the map, or do much else apart from update your location. I find myself using the HTML5 Google Maps version to find my friends.

If your a data junkie and like to know where you’ve been and when, and have other friends using latitude, this app is a must. I hope as this app grows, it will add all the feature that the HTML5 version of google maps has to offer.

Tags: accuracy, API, application switch, background, background application, Blackberry, current version, developers, feature, google, google maps, home, HTML, infancy stage, infancy stages, ios, iphone, junkie, latitude, Latitudie, location, Low, Maps, middle, mobile device, move locations, Nokia, Periodic, periodic updates, real time, servers, stage, switch, time, update, version, way

Apple iOS 4

When I moved from my Nokia E90 to iPhone, there were a few features missing that I used a lot. Being a “tidy freak”, I kept my application organised in folder. I’m also a big fan of Google Latitude and had this running in the background all the time, but these were scarifies I was willing to make to move across to the iPhone. As you can imagine I was overjoyed to find that not only were Folders coming to the next OS for the iPhone, but also “multitasking”. Now granted this isn’t the same multitasking that you get on the likes of Symbian S60, however for what I want it for (Background location), this made my day.

I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, I have an iPhone 3GS and on Thursday will be accepting the delivery of my new, shiny iPhone 4. This means I get to use the full functionality of the new OS, other people (iPhone 3G and before, iPod Touch 2G and before), will only have limited functionality (No multitasking).

So today’s the day, and iOS 4 is available for download, and obviously I’ve now downloaded it and have it installed.

The first think that stands out is the customised Home Screen Wallpaper. Now I know it’s a simple thing, but does really help to personalise your phone. This is something that I took for granted on the Symbian OS, and until it was gone, I started to miss it.

The next thing I did was created folders and started to drop apps into them, this was a god send, Apple have made it as easy as possible for you to do this, simple drag one app on top of another and voila a folder is created. The folder names are automatically named, eg Games, Reference, Social Network, and can only assume it does this based on the iTunes category, this can however be changed . Before I used to organise my application using the screens, Social Media, Weather (yeah, I have multiple weather apps), Shopping, Fitness, Media, Game Tracking, and Games. On OS3 you can have 16 apps per page, however the folders are only 12 apps. This does really clean up the iPhones real estate.

The Spell checker works a treat, I prefer it to it just randomly correcting as I type.

When I saw the email was “Even Better Mail”, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I only have one mail box with all mail in (I use email forwarding for all my accounts, and have my google apps account as the central repository, and splitting my mail accounts using labels), so didn’t think I’d see a benefit, however, being a gmail user is was good to see “organize messages by threads”. It felt a lot more familiar. You get a number at the side of the email to tell you how many are in the chain, clicking on email brings up the “conversation”

Functions like iBooks, the ability to create playlists on the move weren’t something I was really interested in, as I’m more of an Audio book reader, and I prefer to organise my playlists on my Mac.

As for the other functions like Facetime, I guess I’m going to have to wait until Thursday.

I think I can now finally say, there are no features that I’m missing, and glad to be an iPhone owner, I’m sure that over the next few days, I’m going to find features I’ve not initially noticed, but will tweet about them as and when I find them.

edit: After playing with iOS 4 now for a good few hours, I’ve found a few more features. The 3GS does support the digital zoom function on the camera app, you just need to tap the screen once, and you’ll get a slider bar allowing your to zoom in.

The camera app has also been upgraded to include similar features to the Mac software iPhoto, in the way that it now sorts your photos by places and faces, and seems to be loads more accurate with the GPS location.

You also have the option of having 2 different wallpapers, one for the lock screen and one for the home screen. This option can be found on the 3GS under Setting >> Wallpaper.

You can also now change your Safari search engine by going into Setting >> Safari >> and changing the search engine from Google, to Yahoo! and Bing

Currently I only have 1 app on my iPhone that supports “background processing” and that’s Dropbox. If I set something uploaded, then close, this will continue to upload in the background.

Tags: 2g, 3g, 3gs, Download, drag one, Fitness, folder names, folders, freak, functionality, god send, google, ios, iphone, ipod, location, media game, media weather, nokia e90, one of the lucky ones, option, os3, page, phone, Safari, screen, screen wallpaper, screens, search, something, symbian os, Thursday, time, touch, type, voila, Weather, yeah