Location, location, location

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 12:11:18PM +0000, Richard DePas wrote:
> I've used the companion app quite a bit myself. Mainly when boat diving as
> I find using the marble pretty easy when choosing the location of a shore
> dive. That said, I wonder if the case of multi-marking the same dive
> location to get a more accurate GPS fix on it is better handled in the
> companion app rather than pushing that function to Subsurface.
> 
> I completely understand the want for multiple markings on a dive location -
> specifically by boat. When diving a moored, deep shipwreck, that location
> can change quite a bit depending on wind direction or current because the
> mooring will move. As for a wanting to keep multiple GPS locations for a
> very large wreck, I have done that just as Davide by specifying the site
> "Milwaukee Car Ferry - Bow" and "Milwaukee Car Ferry - Stern". In reality
> they are two different dive sites, just on the same shipwreck.

The current design supports either way of doing this.

You come back from your dive. 44 dives on the same dive site. You let your
phone run the whole time. You will likely have 44 fixes. Now you can load
the gps fixes first. When you go to edit your location you will see the
other fixes that are close by in the marble window (many with the
auto-generated title) and you can see locations with the same name (or
start of name) in the completion drop down.

And if you enter names first you won't get help from the globe (as that
doesn't know where you are), but you still get the auto completion (either
once you entered the first dive or right from the start if you have been
here before. And in the latter case you can decide if you want to reuse
the old fix or later add a new fix from your phone.

> Companion has parameters in location radius and such so maybe it can be
> beefed up a little bit to "suggest" the dive site when marking based on a
> previous site within the defined radius. Maybe even asking if you would
> like to use the new coordinates or average them. If the user did not want
> to use the suggested site, then a new site would be created. But when
> creating a new site, I would like to see them automatically unique (such as
> - NewSite1, NewSite2, NewSite3,...)

I want as little required interaction on the companion app as possible.
Maybe that's because I get viciously sea sick and staring on a little
screen on a boat is just a horrible idea to me.  So the idea of just
having it running in the background and then matching the gps fixes with
dive times very much matches my usage pattern.

The names that come from the companion app are made unique by Subsurface.
And the decision when two fixes that are XX meters apart are the same site
or a different site is not something that I really want to hard code in
either of the two apps.

/D