Location via WiFi on Mobile?

Scott Rossi scott at tactilemedia.com
Wed Feb 6 01:35:24 EST 2013


Answering my own question...

After messing around with this for several hours (and some gracious
off-list suggestions from John Dixon), it seems that a delay is indeed
necessary between first calling mobileStartTrackingSensor and actually
trying to get the location.  I wound up essentially doing this:

mobileStartTrackingSensor "location", false
      wait 1000 millisecs with messages -- IMPORTANT
get mobileSensorReading("location", false)



It seems that AT LEAST a 1 second delay is required.  It may be that a
longer delay may be necessary "out in the field".

Boring testing details follow -- feel free to ignore...

I was testing on 3 devices: an iPad 2, and iPhone 4, and an iPod touch,
all via wifi -- and discovered an odd behavior.  The iPad and iPhone
repeatedly failed at attempts to retrieve location, while the iPod worked
consistently.  All were running the same block of code from the same LC
stack.  For the life of me, I could not figure out what the difference
was, until checking the iOS versions: the iPod was running an older system
version (all are using a flavor of iOS 5).  Perhaps Apple added additional
"goodness" to more recent versions of iOS, so location services take
longer to start.  And I haven't even tested on iOS 6 yet.  I don't know
how one would ever be able to track this down, much less troubleshoot it,
without having access to multiple devices.

Anyway, the lesson learned here: when in doubt, delay.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, UX Design




On 2/4/13 10:40 PM, "Scott Rossi" <scott at tactilemedia.com> wrote:

>Hmm, maybe spoke too soon.  Still getting odd, inconsistent results.
>
>I thought maybe if mobileStartTrackingSensor was started using 'true'
>(non-accurate sources) that mobileSensorReading should be used with
>'false' (not detailed). But trying each combination of booleans I still
>don't get a reliable result.
>
>This is weird.  On a few occasions, the expected values were answered, but
>most of the time, I either get empty or the boolean used with
>mobileSensorReading in the answer dialog.
>
>Does it take time to start up location services?  Is it possible that the
>device needs a few seconds of "warm up" time before it can return a
>meaningful result?
>
>Regards,
>
>Scott Rossi
>Creative Director
>Tactile Media, UX Design
>
>
>
>
>On 2/4/13 9:56 PM, "Scott Rossi" <scott at tactilemedia.com> wrote:
>
>>[ forehead slap ]
>>
>>Doh.  Thanks Jacque -- guess I wasn't reading the docs closely enough.
>>
>>Regards,
>>
>>Scott Rossi
>>Creative Director
>>Tactile Media, UX Design
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>On 2/4/13 9:52 PM, "J. Landman Gay" <jacque at hyperactivesw.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On 2/4/13 11:43 PM, Scott Rossi wrote:
>>>> Anyone know if the mobileSensorReading function works for "location"
>>>>on
>>>>iOS
>>>> devices through WiFi?  I can't seem to get any data from the function
>>>>when
>>>> testing a simple stack on an iPad2 and iPod.
>>>>
>>>> Using this script:
>>>>
>>>>       get mobileSensorAvailable("location")
>>>>
>>>>        if it is false then
>>>>
>>>>           answer "Unable to use location."
>>>>
>>>>           exit mouseUp
>>>>
>>>>        end if
>>>>
>>>>        --
>>>>
>>>>        mobileStartTrackingSensor "location", true
>>>>
>>>>        put mobileSensorReading("location", true) into geoData
>>>>
>>>>        mobileStopTrackingSensor "location"
>>>>
>>>>        answer geoData
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Playing around with variations of this script, I either get "true" or
>>>>empty
>>>> in the geoData variable.  Am I missing something?
>>>
>>>It looks like the detailed location (what you get when you specify
>>>"true" in the second param) will be an array, so after getting the
>>>geoData you'd need to parse out something like geoData["latitude"] or
>>>geoData["timestamp"].
>>>
>>>-- 
>>>Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
>>>HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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