Posts Tagged ‘GPS’

hotspotdot for webOS v1.1.0

The 1.1.0 update for the hotspotdot webOS app is up. You can now create a new account from within the app, share hotspots via. email, update the locations of your existing hotspots, and refresh the current list of hotspots.

hotspotdot webOS screenshot 1 hotspotdot webOS screenshot 2 hotspotdot webOS screenshot 3

I can’t respond to reviews in the app catalog, so I’ll do it here.

Potential = 5 stars. Currently, still a work in progress – but fills a much needed void on webOS = being able to save fav places in google maps.

2 features missing:

1. Search via keyword/category. You can enter keywords for your places, but then it just shows everything in a list anyways. Maybe make it autosearch – when the program is open you can just starts typing and the matching entries will pop up.

2. Ability to enter places you aren’t current at. Right now to add any place you have to physically be there. This prevents the most common use of fav places = hear about a good restaurant from a friend and save its location so you can go there later.

Hope to see this developed more…and i’d pay for it!

I’ll definitely work on autosearch. Adding locations that your not currently at is problematic because there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism on webOS by which you can poll the locations of a selected marker from the Maps app. You can, of course, do this from the web app.

2 stars because it functions & is a cool idea….BUT…this is clearly not formatted for WebOS (Or maybe mobile?). I say that because you have to sign up 1st & when the sign in screen loads it is so small as to be unreadable. Once you expand the screen to enter you info, you have to slide aound to get it all in and “submit”.

That might sound harsh/anal but it is the simple things – like useability – that frustrate users and make them look elsewhere.

From Chris T

Very true, the sign-up process was not part of the app prior to this version and the process via. the website really was not designed for a mobile device – though everything should work. This version should make the process more mobile-friendly.

Ok.. Not really what I expected.. I was reading into this as WiFi hotspot designator.. Just a basic location designator?? Uh..ok…

From Anonymous

I was hoping it would perhaps look for “HotSpots”, posibly reporting strength, then recording GPS location, like a sniffer.

From Mark R

There seems to be some confusion that the app deals with wifi hotspots. To (hopefully) avoid this, I’ve altered the app description to the following:

hotspotdot allows you to easily record and tag locations (“hotspots”) that are important to you. Your personal database of locations (and related metadata) can then be accessed to show you exactly where your hotspots are and how to get to them.

Finally, for bug reports, feature requests, etc. you can now email me at aautar@hotspotdot.net.

hotspotdot for webOS

I originally conceived hotspotdot as a smartphone app, as its utility meshes perfectly with a smartphone’s GPS receiver, but the contest I was entering (Microsoft’s My App is Better Challenge) required a web app. The web app is useful but when it comes to adding a hot spot it’s hard to beat hitting a button and pulling in your global position instantly.

Anyways, the bottom line is I went ahead and built the mobile app anyway. I have a Palm Pixi, so I built it for webOS.

The app was approved and published in the app catalog a few hours ago, so anyone with a Palm Pre or a Palm Pixi should be able to get it soon. It’s free. Also, you’ll need an account at my.hotspotdot.net to use it (sorry, I didn’t add support for account creation within the app).

hotspotdot webOS screenshot 1 hotspotdot webOS screenshot 2 hotspotdot webOS screenshot 3

This if my first webOS app and my first mobile app!

The Mojo framework proved to be fairly approachable. Making everything Javascript + HTML-ish markup was a very good call. However, a few bits of criticism:

  • I ran into some annoyances due to nothing more than flaky documentation. I should say 99% of the documentation is very good and thorough, but small bits of missing info, like needing the .mojo prefix for method calls, can drive you up the wall.
  • A intermediate-level tutorial would have been very much appreciated. Palm has the Getting Started tutorial followed by the fairly advanced Client-Server tutorial.
  • At various point in the documentation (e.g. here) there are examples of declaring buttons in a simpler way, entirely within the DOM (no setupWidget call necessary) and no x-mojo-element attribute on the div. This shortcut should probably be avoided; you have to understand that all you can do with these elements is respond to the Mojo.Event.tap event – you can’t change the underlying model, label, etc.
  • To manipulate/update widgets, you need to modify the widget’s underlying model (an array of properties). This was somewhat surprising to me. I would have figured, in keeping with the JS + HTML scheme and how things are done in an AJAX web app, you would modify the DOM of the view to change things.
  • Mojo uses the Prototype framework. Prototype is okay… AJAX calls are simple enough, but XML parsing was a bit more difficult compared to jQuery, which is more powerful for traversing and pulling elements out of an XMLDocument.
  • You have to work in Eclipse for an integrated IDE experience. I would have much preferred a Netbeans plug-in.

Overall, I’m still pretty happy with the Mojo framework and I was able to code, test, and deploy an app fairly quickly (~2 weeks, working on this on and off; probably less than 72 hours total).