Subsurface mobile and the GPS service

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Sat, Dec 05, 2015 at 12:02:05PM +0200, Willem Ferguson wrote:
> I have been playing around with the mobile GPS service (Android 4.3 on
> Galaxy S3). I did this by activating the locations service before I went on
> my Saturday morning errands, creating some dives by hand on Linux Subsurface
> after returning from the errands, and then downloading the locations and
> applying them to the hand-created "dives". Things appeared to work more or
> less ok, but I will finally see when I use this while diving a week from
> now.  A few comments on the UI.

This is encouraging
I have done more or less the same and things seemed to work as well. But
as you say, the real test will be a dive trip. I appreciate your sacrifice
to go diving just to help test this :-)

> 1) When I activate Subsurface-mobile I get the screen on the left of the
> attached image. The button at the bottom allows me to drag the screen to the
> right, bringing up the middle screen in the attached image. Notice that the
> options in the left hand screen are more or less duplicated in the middle
> screen. As far as I can see, upon starting Subsurface-mobile, the program
> should bring up the middle screen. If dives have not been loaded (see top
> part of screen on left) this info should be shown when one chooses the "View
> Log" option on the main menu.

Careful - "Viel log" actually shows the log file, not the dive list...
But you bring up an interesting point - maybe we should just start with
the drawer (that the name for the menu that comes in from the left and is
shown in your second picture) open. Sebastian, is that reasonable?

> 2) The GPS menu on the right of the attached image: The option "Run location
> service" appears three times, once on the main menu (middle screen) and
> twice in the GPS menu (right screen). I suggest that it only appears once
> (not 3x), and this should be in the GPS screen (on the right). The checkbox
> is a friendly way for achieving this. The ultimate would be if there is an
> icon in the icon bar at the top of the Android screen indicating that the
> location service is running (in a similar way to other services like Wifi),
> but this would probably belong to finishing touches at the end of the
> development cycle.

So this is only showing it twice (technically), because the option at the
bottom is "constant" - so it's the same. But you're right, it need to go
from the GPS menu. I'll remove that (easy enough).

I don't know if we can add a small icon to the notification area of Andoid
- need to read through the Qt/QML docs to figure that out. That would
indeed be the most native way to indicate the running location service
(and that's what the companion app used to do).

> 3) Having used the location service, it is critical to be able to view the
> individual GPS points and to be able to delete some of these points. This is
> possible with the companion app and has simplified life for me on countless
> occasions after performing back-to-back dives. Therefore in the screen on
> the right in the attached image I would like to see an additional item "View
> stored GPS data" just above the item "Apply GPS data to dives". This option
> should, at a minimum, allow one to delete some of the locations that may
> confuse Subsurface when applying the GPS positions to dives.

Good point. Something to add to the TODO list, I guess.

> I have not yet managed to download dives from the cloud.

I test this all the time and it seems to work reasonably well.
Please try what I suggested in the other email. That should deal with any
local left-over data. Worst case, use a different email address and create
a new account. You should be able to use "willemferguson+2 at zoology.up.ac.za"
as almost all mail systems will allow you to add alias addresses this way.
And as far as the cloud storage algorithm is concerned, this will create a
new and distinct entry.

> I hope I do not sound slightly critical, this is great development you are
> doing!

You sound really really helpful. You point out issues which allows us to
fix them before users get bitten by them. MOST appreciated.

/D