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What other info would you like to see there? Currently it only shows GPS info, of which we are showing everything that seemed useful to us. I could see tapping on the Speed label to change it to Pace as being useful, but not sure what else.. What did you have in mind?
lol, nice slogan 🙂
We will try to get this one in in the next update. There is already the issue that during tracking or nav mode, the main buttons are not accessible on iPhone. We were planning to deal with this by allowing swipe to return to the main buttons, so your suggestion fits nicely with that idea..
Thanks for the feedback! We are aware of these issues and are working to solve them. The first one you mentioned should be corrected in our next update.
Thanks for the feedback, XOMTOR! We will look into the memory issues further, but are a bit surprised by it.
PocketEarth does consume a large amount of memory, but it should be within reasonable limits. This is mostly due to it keeping a large amount of map tiles and map data in memory which improves performance and battery life by not having to reload from disk as often. If iOS tells PocketEarth that the system is low on memory, it can generally free up 40-60MB quickly. We carefully profile the app for memory leaks before every update we release, and have a handful of 3rd gen iPods and 1st gen iPads that we use for stress testing it.
We have noticed an iOS “memory fragmentation” issue where the device if it hasn’t been rebooted in a long time (over 1-2 months), it is unable to provide PocketEarth with its memory requests causing it to crash. Please open the app multi-tasking bar and close all apps, then power off the device, and turn it on again. If you still see frequent crashing, please let us know what location you are looking at on the map, and what iOS version you are running so we can investigate further!
Also, how are you getting this info about memory usage? We use very precise tools that Apple provides us with, and our numbers don’t seem to match what you are saying. For example, PocketEarth should always launch to 37MB standing memory usage, plus the map data cache which varies based on map location and zoom level, but generally means 50MB total RAM usage at launch. Generally, what we seen is that PocketEarth will get up to around 90MB of RAM usage, get a memory warning, and immediately drop back down to ~50MB. The Settings screen uses exactly 1.6MB when opened the first time (which is retained even after closing it, but probably should be released).
Thanks noun ours for the list of POIs and the suggestions!
BuckyE, we can try to add more of the POI categories in the Map Layers.
OSM’s POI categorization scheme is massively detailed, but not really well organized. For example, they have only 3 or 4 top level categories (amenity, shop, etc), each with a ton of items under it. For most users who are not familiar with the OSM tagging system, this is not so useful. Also many users wouldn’t know what an “amenity” encompasses, and there is also the issue of localizing the metadata to the different languages that our app supports.
We actually make use of POI metadata in 4 different ways:
1> Object Descriptions: We show object descriptions when you click on a POI or on its detail view. For this we have rules for combining and localizing the info so it can be presented in a more concise and simple manner for the average user. For example most people would probably prefer to see “Public Airport (SFO)” than a set of 4 key/value pairs.
2> Stylesheets: We don’t use mapnik, rather we built our own OpenGL based rendering engine from scratch which is much faster and more memory efficient than mapnik enabling it to run smoothly on a mobile device. We do currently use the standard SJJB set of OSM POI icons, although with some custom icons, and custom high resolution versions created for Retina devices. The stylesheet uses the POI tags to pick and show icons on the map, and we replicated the standard OSM map as a base, and have added a few dozen additional items to it. We are working to add even more such icons, but are anxious to implement a good clustering algorithm first, as without it, many of the less important POI could take priority over the more important ones. By clustering I mean showing a single icon on the map to represent a cluster of many items at or near that location which cannot all be shown at once because of the limited space. When you click on such a cluster, it would expand out, in one way or another, to show all the items at that spot.
3> Nearby Search Categories: Here we came up with our own scheme with lots of top level categories and reasonable subcategories, and convert OSM POIs into the scheme. Some POI are cross listed in multiple categories for the convenience of finding them more easily. For most users, having more top level categories make it a lot easy to find things. We are not alone in doing this, nearly every other OSM based map app and POI directory app we have seen does this as well.
4> Map Layers: These are provided to allow you to turn off things you don’t want to see, or to enable things that most users don’t need by default. It could definitely be more comprehensive than it is now. This could mirror the detailed OSM set, or could mirror our Nearby category/subcategory scheme. Alternatively we are considering a way to allow the user to select a category from nearby and highlight/show only those items on the map.
OSM does not include schedule info that would be so helpful for a routing engine, but it does include the route line info (via Relations with type=route). This is fairly comprehensive for metro/subway, and for many big cities also bus routes.
We plan to make use of this info in the near future to provide interactive line highlighting when selecting a metro or bus stop on the map, possibly a Map Layer overlay as well, and eventually (long term) point to point transit routing.
Thanks for the feedback about the icons, we are just using OSM icons so far, but would like to customize these (and others).
We normally try to update the OSM data in PocketEarth to the latest once a month. Currently it is a bit behind though. The OSM data got too big, and broke one of our processes. We are working to correct this, and should have the latest OSM data available soon for an in-app data update.
We would like to offer more frequent (weekly, or even daily updates for OSM contributors) however at the moment that is not possible due to both technical and financial reasons.
Re 11. If you email us your GPX file to info @ geomagik.com we will add newlines to it and email it back to you to check if this is the issue.
Update: We successfully imported a PocketEarth GPX file into Garmin Basecamp. So the lack of newlines isn’t the problem. If you send us the GPX file we will look into this issue further.
Thanks for the email! This GPX file contained custom GPX Extensions created by Garmin which PocketEarth does not support. Good news is that we have now added support for this and it will be available in our next update!
Agreed, this would be really useful, and we were already working on this for v1.5 but it didn’t make it in. We will try to include this feature soon!
Thanks for the feedback! We will try to correct this in the next few days and will let you know.
The text entry field on the coordinates search can handle any of more than half a dozen coordinate formats! Please see our Help Manual for examples of some of the most common supported formats.
On the other hand, if you were referring to the DMS roller wheels input screen for coordinate search, then you can just leave Seconds at 0 and just set the Degrees and Minutes as desired. There is limited space and thus this wheel based input is not very suitable for inputing other coordinate formats. We could possibly add DM.mm format support as well if that seems useful?
Thanks for feedback! We are moving in this direction! With v1.5 we included over 1 million additional POIs from more than 20 categories. We will continue to add additional ones. The only reason this process of adding them is a little slow is that we have to first figure out which ones are missing, and then find or create appropriate icon graphics for them. If you have some Top items you would like to see, let us know and we will try to add them sooner!
The GPX file format is designed to store GPS Tracks and not routes with driving instructions. If you export a Route from PocketEarth or from a website, it will loose the routing info, and be treated as GPS Track when imported. This is a limitation of the format itself. Our next update will include the option to export an individual route in our “PocketEarth Archive” format which will allow correct importation.
Could you email us an example GPX file to info @ geomagik.com so we can investigate?
Please note that GPX format is designed to store GPS Tracks and not routes with driving instructions. This is a limitation of the format itself.
Wow, sry to hear this! We haven’t had any other reports of this so far and are not sure offhand what could have happened. Could you answer a few questions to help us better understand:
1> What specific device model do you have?
2> What version of iOS?
3> What version of PocketEarth were you updating from?
4> Can you connect the device to your computer, and open iTunes. Then select the device, and choose the Apps tab. Then scroll down to the File Sharing section, and find and select PocketEarth. Does it show a file called “Recovery.pocketearth_archive”, and if so, what size does it say it is?Thanks!
We changed the app icon after receiving dozens of emails from users saying how bad the old one was. We even got some bad reviews on the App Store just because of it!
Overall, we are very happy with the new icon, however, having released v1.5 update, we realize that the icon on non-Retina devices is not as high quality as it should have been, and will be polishing it more for our next update.
stewart82, can I ask if you have a Retina or non-Retina device and what you don’t like about the new icon?
