Tony Hillerson's dashboard

Make it happen!

Thanks for looking into this, Tim. Sorry for all the trouble. I could still look into how to make that kind of problem a little more clear, and I'll let the right folks know that it was classified over 18.

Thanks again,
Tim

Tim, if you are able to hook your device up to your computer and get the log at the time of the crash, that would save a lot of work.

Tim, I'll do what I can to reproduce and fix the problem. Again, sorry that you're experiencing this issue.

Bernd,

On the other hand, caching your placemarks is not a bad idea at all. In future releases we're probably going to take a look at caching and things to make things work better in bad network situations and generally let you do what you want to do faster.

Tim, what are you doing when it crashes? What steps can you follow to make it crash?

Tim - even with the latest version?

Troy,

When you tap "Check In" the app will put you at the location you see on the screen. Is that location generally inaccurate? Or are you getting put at a location other than the one displayed?

Brad, it's a bit tough to do something different when the app is running vs. in the background because there's really no distinction, but we're looking into figuring out the problem. For now you could try decreasing the setting in Settings > Device.

We'll try to address this as soon as we can, though. It's annoying not having that kind of control.

That's not good, sorry to hear that Thorsten. I'll look into solving that.

Tim, does the app crash when you're not driving? Do you have GPS and wireless on or off?

I have no trouble when I'm driving, but of course we're both probably going to get in wrecks.

jrit, There is a setting to save the photo when you post it. It's under Settings > Photo Management.

If you notice that a photo post fails because you lost network access or signal, there should be a button which says "try again" on that screen. Do you remember seeing that? That's a way to just try the whole operation again when you get signal back.

Park, let me explain what happened here:

First of all, the app does check you in when you post to a new place. What I suspect happened to you is that you were still in what we call your "geofence" around your house.

This is not really something we expect users to worry about a lot, so you probably don't know what I mean. What we do is keep you inside of a geofence of around 3/4 of a kilometer around the place you last checked in, and don't find a new location if you're still in that radius. This is the default for the iPhone, and I assume you haven't changed any of the settings under Settings > I am...

What I think happened was that you were still in that radius when you posted the photo, so your location still snapped to where you had previously checked in. The reason we do that is to make sure just stepping outside or down the block, or even strange variations in location data from the device don't make you seem to lose your checked in location.

What you could have done is quickly glanced at your location, saw that it was still snapping to your home, and then hit "find me", which would have gotten rid of that geofence and found the street corner nearest you. Your photo would have ended up there and you would have been checked in there too.

Sorry that that turned out to be a bad experience. The place snapping feature turns out to be what you want about 99% of the time, there's just this exact case where it's a little unclear what's going on. In the worst case, though, you can always trust that the location on the "I am..." view is where your posts will go and if you're not checked in there already, the buttons will say something like "Check in and post" instead of just "Post"

I hope that clears things up. If you have any other questions, let me know.

Tony

Interesting idea about the placemarks, justindula, thanks. As for the size of the app, it's just got a lot of screens and some custom graphics. I'll try to see what I can do in later releases about getting that size down.

@Mike - interesting. I'll see if I can reproduce that. I bet it's getting wifi's location and then GPS's or something like that. It's not the best user experience, though, so I'll try to see what I can do there.

There's a new version of the app in the Market. Can you confirm that it fixes the problems you were having?

A new version of the app is available in the Market. Can any of you confirm that it fixes the problems you were seeing?

The app with this fix is submitted. It's up to Apple now. I'll let you know when it's out.