Companion app commentary..

[Linus Torvalds]

Ok, so I'm now on my second dive trip where I'm using the updated
companion app, and I have to just say that it works really well.

At least on my phone, it takes basically no battery at all to put it
into background mode, and then I can just forget about it for the
whole day. It really works.

The _one_ thing that doesn't work so well is live drift-dives, where
the boat will generally not hang around the dive site very long,
because quite often the entry-point is precarious (since it's near a
reef). So the GPS coordinates don't work that well for that case. That
said, that is also the case where you really *really* can't do things
manually either (because you're all geared up and ready to roll into
the water as you approach the dive site), so it's not like the
alternative would work any better.

But maybe the defaults could be lowered a bit? I changed the 30min
default interval to 15min for my dives today because I noticed this
issue yesterday (I've had two consecutive days of live dive drop-off
and pick-up), and that didn't seem to really hurt battery use either.
I might even be inclined to make it 5min for tomorrow (another drift
dive day). At that point, you're pretty likely to catch the boat at
least pretty close to the dive site - it usually takes a few minutes
to get divers and boats into position.

Maybe the battery use is very phone-dependent, and my Nexus 4 just
happens to work well with gps (it does Glonass and it does seem to
help make it get a fix more quickly). But I thought I'd at least
mention this issue.

Anyway, I find that I'm very happy just taking a photo of the
whiteboard for dive site names after the dives, so I don't even miss
writing the names into the companion app, and the background service
model really matches at least how I want to dive, and it's been really
easy getting the gps data for this trip.

Good job.

                         Linus