Ryan Boswell [dot] com

Google Latitude

December 14th | No Comments

Earlier this week, Google launched the Latitude iPhone app. I’m pretty excited about the app because it’ll finally give me a chance to really use Latitude, since before I had to consciously go to the Latitude website and update my location, which defeats the purpose of a persistent-location service and makes it no better or different from checkin-based location services.

Persistent Location

I think persistent-location is a useful tool for personal use, I like the idea of being able to look through my history and see where I’ve been or where I went on a given day. However, I’m not very comfortable with other people having that information, even if they are my friends. One of the blog posts I read about the subject in the wake of the release argues that while persistent-location has it’s merits, a better method of implementing it would be of highlighting more unique locations that you visit (after you’ve built up a history of your regular haunts) and “checking” you in to those locations rather than providing an open stream of your movements throughout the day. I really like this use of the location data, because I don’t want to think about noting that I am somewhere, I want my phone to do that for me, or at least pushing me a notification asking if I want to checkin to a location I just arrived at so I can choose and then forget about it rather than remembering an hour later “Oh yeah, I should checkin here”.

Latitude

After two full days of using Latitude (leaving it running with background updating turned on), I have to say that I do like it, but it definitely has some kinks to work out.

Google provides a really nice interface for viewing your location history. It’s a map of all the location within the date range you give (defaulted to the most recent time-span) with markers of all the locations it recorded you at. On the left side is an ordered list of all of these locations with timestamps of when they were recorded.

Possibly the coolest feature in this is the play button. Clicking it will “play” through your movements, moving along the map from marker to marker in the order you visited them. Kind of a location replay.

However, there is one small problem with all of this. Several of the locations it recorded were off. Most were fairly accurate (within a block or so of my actual location), but at it’s worst it was half a mile away from where I actually was (for example, my history says I was on a mountain nearby when I’m pretty sure I was sitting in Starbucks coding, not that I’m complaining about the appearance of being active while I’m really sipping down my second eggnog latte of the day). You can remove markers from your history (either to remove an erroneous location, or hide that you had gone somewhere), either individually or for an entire day or time span, which can be useful. The problem is that this is most likely due to inaccurate GPS locations that the iPhone provides Latitude, which means it’s not a problem Google can readily fix.

One other interesting feature is the distance progress bar. It totals your distance traveled since you started using Latitude and shows it as a progress bar of how far you need to travel to reach the Moon, a creative and interesting method of displaying that information.

I would talk about their dashboard, but unfortunately I don’t have enough usage data for them to display in the dashboard. Google recommends that I check back in 1-2 weeks and I should see something. So I might update then if there’s anything worth writing about.

Overall I really do like Latitude, and I’m definitely going to continue using it for my own personal use and records. The service definitely has promise in the future with a few minor tweaks, but I really doubt that I’ll be sharing any of my location data with friends, at least with how it works now.

Official iOS Google Voice App – My Take

December 6th | No Comments

So the official Google Voice app for the iPhone has been out for a few weeks now. If you know anything about me, you probably know the past few months I’ve been obsessing over Google Voice and switching to it. The most difficult part of this was that there was no efficient way for me to switch because there was no native app due to the whole Apple/AT&T/Google brouhaha. But that (partly) changed when Apple changed it’s terms for apps and actually published their guidelines/restrictions on apps. I’ve already written about my impressions of the 3rd party applications that were released almost immediately (in short, not terrible, but definitely lacking).

When Google released their official app, I was ecstatic and pissed at the same time. Pissed because of the timing mainly. I had only days before finished cobbling together a hack job for getting GV Mobile+ (one of the 3rd party apps) to have sudo-push notifications of new text messages using Prowl and a lot of sketchy looking web services. It took quite a bit of effort and time to get that working, and then it all went to waste, more or less. But I was probably more happy since I thought there would finally be a proper iOS app for Google Voice.

Initially it was amazing. The first two days or so it seemed perfect. I got proper push notifications for txt messages and missed calls/voicemails. I was able to easily make calls out through Google Voice. It seemed as if nothing could go wrong. I dropped my AT&T unlimited texting feature in favor of the much cheaper 200/month option. Then the emotional high of finally being able to use Google Voice wore off and I started seeing the (many) flaws.

The biggest problems stems from the way the app works fundamentally. There is no local storage of anything. I mean *anything*, except of course whatever information is required to authenticate my account. All of my text messages/voicemails/call history/contact favorites/etc… is all stored in the cloud, which is fine to an extent. Obviously for Google Voice as a whole to work, all of that needs to be stored online. But it becomes a real problem when there isn’t even an offline cache stored on my phone for more than a few hours at best. If I have poor service (which is sadly common because it’s AT&T’s network), I am all but unable to send or receive text messages. I get push notifications of them fine most of the time, but going to read the full message if it gets cut off on the notification, or to respond can take anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes before I can do anything because the app has to load everything.

More often than not, the app crashes when I open a notification and it tries to query the server for an update. This means that I have to re-open the application and wait 60-120 seconds, sometimes more, for it to load my most recent text conversations/call history/etc… This takes a surprisingly long time considering all of it together shouldn’t be more than a MB (it’s plain text for crying out loud), even when I’m at home on WiFi (~ 10MB/s down wirelessly). When I’m relegated to using only edge it’s horrendous and most of the time I am unable to respond for several minutes.

What would make all of this so much better would be if Google simply stored a cache of my history on my device so that it doesn’t have to download all of it dozens of times a day. It would save me time and headaches, AT&T some network load (and we all know they need the help), and Google some bandwidth costs (me alone is nothing, but imagine how many iPhone users have the app and end up downloading 20-30MBs a day? and if Google expects GV to grow, that number is only going to expand).

Another quirky “feature” is that even though I will get a push notification of a txt message, the app itself has to load that txt message after I open the notification, which can take a while as I mentioned earlier. Of course, this probably has something to do with the no real local storage thing.

As a note, as far as I know, the Android GV app does store a local cache, so these problems aren’t an issue.

Overall, while I am beyond happy that Google has decided not to ignore iOS, I feel as if they’re handicapping those of us that choose it over Android. I have to say, I am disappointed in the quality of the app that Google released. It truly feels like a rush job, even though it was almost two months between when Apple released their new guidelines/rules basically allowing a GV app and when it was actually released. So here’s hoping that Google pushes out an update soon that addresses this and makes it a useable app again.