Marcello's dashboard

Hi transcendence,
first of all thanks for posting this.
We need your feedback to improve bluemapia.

I checked your account and haven't found any issue.
Could you please retry to enter carefully your login/password on the iPhone app?
It could be that you had some connection problem during the session and the message shown was not the appropriate one.

Keep posting on Bluemapia!

Thanks
Marcello

Folks,
it can be that the Motorola Q11 is having the same problem of the Motorola Q9H, that was also found on the Samsung Blackjack II and other devices and fixed by this patch on
ModaCo

This is an old problem with the Intermediate Drivers on certain devices.

Hi Carlos,
what is exactly the message you see from bluemapia when you start the command: "Activate GPS" in the "Instruments" menu?

Also, you probably need to configure bluemapia to indicate the serial port used for the GPS on your mobile phone. Simply go to "Instruments"->"NMEA Input" and select the right COM port for your device, leaving all the other fields with the default values.

Unfortunately, I don't have a Motorola Q11 here with me to find out the COM port mapped to the GPS for that device, so you have probably to do some tests to find out the one that works, unless there is some system utility on your device to setup the GPS and the COM port mapping (similar to what is usually done with the bluetooth).

Let me know.

Regards,
Marcello Ferrero

We changed the code of the popup to solve this issue on Firefox.
Please try again and let us know in case the problem is still there. We tested on Firefox for Windows. Maybe you are using a different platform.

It should be solved now.
Thanks for the precious report.

Marcello

That's another bug. Thanks. I immediately start working on this.

Arek,
this is clearly a bug that occurs on Firefox.
We are now working on it. I'll let you know when it's fixed.

Please, continue to report issues and suggestions.
They are really valuable for us.

Marcello

A "Full Screen" option is already in the list of candidate features for one of the next site upgrades.

Stay tuned!

Marcello

MrOlsen, we are happy to announce that we have implemented your idea. If you now go to the profile page you find "Embed User Position" that allows to copy/paste the sript to embed the current position into another page.

I investigated this problem that is apparently due to a limitation of the standard Open File Windows dialog.

On touch devices in fact you can select files only within folders at the first level of the Storage Card. It is instead impossible to navigate sub-sub-folders.

This also happens with other applications such as Excel mobile.

On Windows Mobile Smartphones (keyboard-based) this does not happen and that's why we are discovering this only now (unfortunately we cannot do extensive testing on all possible platforms and devices).

I've not checked on latest Windows Mobile 6 devices and cannot say if Microsoft fixed this limitation. Please let me know.

Given this, I would suggest to use File Explorer to move the track file to the webroot directoy and open the file from there.

We will work to fix this problem in the next releases.

Regarding the documentation, you can find the preliminary PreAlpha manual here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfi...

It was not updated with the new capabilities of the Beta version. If someone would like to help me, please let me know.

Don't forget that Bluemapia Mobile is a Free and Open Source project that will grow faster and better with the contribution of all of you.

Marcello

Very good. I've now also added a page here http://www.bluemapia.com/bluemapia/?p...
to describe the sintax of a MAPSERVER_DEFINITION, so that users can try also other map sources and add them to the list.
If you know of a new source that works with bluemapia mobile don't forget to post here and share with all of us.

Here below you find the new map server URLs that you need in the bluemapia.ini file to have google terrain and map working again.

You just need to transfer the bluemapia.ini file from your mobile windows directory to your pc; substitute the MAPSERVER_DEFINITION rows with the new ones and transfer back bluemapia.ini to your mobile device, substituting the old file.

MAPSERVER_DEFINITION=OpenStreetMap,.png,0,0,0,18,256,256,http://tile.openstreetmap.org/ZZZ/XXX...
MAPSERVER_DEFINITION=GoogleSat,.jpg,0,0,0,17,256,256,http://khm0.google.com/kh?v=33&&x=XXX...|http://khm1.google.com/kh?v=33&&x=XXX&s=&y=YYY&z=ZZZ|http://khm2.google.com/kh?v=33&&x=XXX...|http://khm3.google.com/kh?v=33&&x=XXX&s=&y=YYY&z=ZZZ
MAPSERVER_DEFINITION=GoogleMap,.png,0,0,0,17,256,256,http://mt0.google.com/mt?v=w2.88&x=XX...|http://mt1.google.com/mt?v=w2.88&x=XXX&y=YYY&z=ZZZ|http://mt2.google.com/mt?v=w2.88&x=XX...|http://mt3.google.com/mt?v=w2.88&x=XXX&y=YYY&z=ZZZ
MAPSERVER_DEFINITION=GoogleTer,.png,0,0,0,17,256,256,http://mt0.google.com/mt?v=w2p.87&x=X...|http://mt1.google.com/mt?v=w2p.87&x=XXX&y=YYY&z=ZZZ|http://mt2.google.com/mt?v=w2p.87&x=X...|http://mt3.google.com/mt?v=w2p.87&x=XXX&y=YYY&z=ZZZ
MAPSERVER_DEFINITION=MicrosoftMap,.png,2,0,0,19,256,256,http://r0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.ne...|http://r1.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/rQQQ.png?g=138&shading=hill|http://r2.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.ne...|http://r3.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/rQQQ.png?g=138&shading=hill
MAPSERVER_DEFINITION=MicrosoftSat,.png,2,0,0,19,256,256,http://a0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.ne...|http://a1.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/aQQQ.png?g=138&shading=hill|http://a2.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.ne...|http://a3.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/aQQQ.png?g=138&shading=hill
MAPSERVER_DEFINITION=MicrosoftHyb,.png,2,0,0,19,256,256,http://h0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.ne...|http://h1.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/hQQQ.png?g=138&shading=hill|http://h2.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.ne...|http://h3.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/hQQQ.png?g=138&shading=hill – Marcello, on November 18, 2008 17:24

Tully:
first of all I want to thank you for your positive comments and very detailed report.

We really need this kind of feedback to validate what we are doing here at bluemapia and take the right choices for our community.

After all bluemapia is for you and can grow only with your contibutions.

I see we have this backspace and volume control issues with the Motorola q9 series. We have seen similar behaviour with the volume control only once in the past with a Windows Mobile emulator that was not properly set, not on physical devices (although the motorola q9 was not one of the devices we tested).

Now, assuming you have installed Bluemapia Mobile for Windows Mobile Smartphone (keyboard-based) and not the Windows Mobile (touchscreen) version, I believe the problem can be related to Windows Mobile 6. We will do some tests in the next days.

Also, I see you converted some KAP files. That's great. I would like to remind you that the conversion process generates 3 files with the same name of the original KAP. They are all suffixed with _ALLT and extensions .tif, .bsb and .pol.

The tif file contains the converted raster maps, while the other 2 contain data needed to geo-reference the map. In other words, if you move the tif file to your mobile device, than you can open it and visualize the map. If you also move the other 2 files, you also see the Lat/Lon position of the cursor. The geo-referencing process is today an approximation as it is based on a polynomial calculation. Anyway we think this should be enough for a use in conjunction with bluemapia.com (NOT FOR REAL NAVIGATION PURPOSES).

We know this algorithm can be improved and we invite developers to work with us to write a better algorithm for this specific area. Our open source project on sourceforge.org and the bluemapia mobile public license (GPL) is there for this purpose.

Terrain and maps are not visible anymore because google periodically changes the addresses of their map servers. These addresses are in the ini file and with some work it is not hard for an experienced user to find the new addresses and change the ini file.

Next release of bluemapia will have an update button to update the map server addresses from the bluemapia server.

Hope to see some of your best trips and placemarks on bluemapia.com soon.

bluemapia saves tracks in the standard GPX format. This requires to follow the GPX standard for time that must be in UTC (Universal time Coordinates), the same timezone of the GPS satellite. Anyway, there is obviously the need to show together with the UTC time also the local time, on the panel at the bottom of the bluemapia app visible when the GPS is connected. Currently we don't support different timezones for this and everything is in UTC. We will add this in future in one of our next releases. Neverthless, even in that case GPX tracks will continue to have UTC time as this is required by the standard.

We will investigate if the problem is reproducable only to the Motorola Q9h or if it is due to Windows Mobile 6, that we have not heavily tested so far.
We will let you know. In the meanwhile I would like to know from other users if they have experienced similar problems with Windows Mobile 6.
Anyway, the changes in the bluemapia.ini file should work and at least you should be able now to activate your track with the right TRACK_PERIOD settings.