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I read somewhere that external bluetooth GPS receivers save quite some battery when navigating on a smartphone. How much battery-saving do we we speak of here? I own a SGS2.

I measured long ago that running a GPS on a previous phone was around the 80-90mAh mark, where bluetooth is nearly negligible.  So the battery savings is good, but what's even better is having an accurate and reliable GPS.  Built-in GPSes suck.  They have poor accuracy, poor sensitivity, and are often very slow to warm up.

Uh, what does that iphone app have to do with OSM or Locus?

The iphone app is downloading osm maps and locus is downloading osm maps

Menion is getting trouble because of this because too many locus users are  downloading too much

Have  you read the 1st post?

Of course I read the first post, but the link had nothing to do with OSM etc..  Perhaps it was translated badly..

Uh, what does that iphone app have to do with OSM or Locus?

Turning off guidance when logging a Field Note sounds good to me, one less thing to do.  I'd still like to be able to also move it to another database automatically, as I like to save waypoints etc associated with found caches.

during september was downloaded around 1.2TB of vector maps
as I calculate, I expect around 2TB of online maps when there will be limit to 10k tiles per day. So quite a lot ...

Yikes, much higher than I expected.  Of course, 10k tiles per day is much higher than I expected too.

you really mean 20-40$? Seems like nonsence ... by my simple compute it will be around 500$ per month. There is really a lot of users . I'll try some small server to test how this all will works, but EC2 seems to be too expensive solution ...

See, first off the calculator was a little confusing, and I have no idea how much actual data will be used  I've looked around a little into how to set up my own tile server but I'd need to talk to the owner of the boxen I use..  Big machines on fat pipes, but not sure he'd want that sort of commitment.

That said, any idea how much data Locus users would download in an average month, order of magnitude...  10g.  50g.. 200g?

I've tried to figure out what an Amazon EC2 server would cost, but its calculator is using all terms I don't quite understand, even as a typical systems administrator..  I'd have to look more into what all of it means.

But I wonder if EC2 + http://tiledrawer.com/ is a possible alternative?  Unless I have the calculator very wrong, I'm seeing something like $20-$40 a month, but again, I'm mostly guessing.

Anyone here use EC2 and can estimate better?

As I thought about this more today, it occurred to me that maybe there is some compromise that can be made to get OSM to accept Locus.  Maybe OSM won't compromise, dunno..

First part is having two separate user agents in Locus, one for the online loading of maps the other for downloading of maps.  This is not to evade OSM filters; it would be communicated to them and agreement made.  The point being to ultimately have all "online" access unblocked, but give them the ability to block "downloads" in the future if they feel the need.

Second, greater restrictions on per-source tiles.  Maybe 2000 a day from a given source, such as any OSM, or any Mapquest.  I think this needs to be done regardless because other map providers may also feel Locus users are downloading too much.  Again, multiplied by the number of users, this number might not be sufficient, it might be 500, or it might be 5000, I don't know.  Perhaps with greater restrictions, OSM will open up "download" Tile access again.

Regardless, I hope they open up "online" access.  As per the original post it does look like anything lower than 17 works okay, and maybe that's sufficient for most things.  But we don't want them to limit things further, etc..

Well, that sucks, but sounds like nothing you can do Menion.  I'd have to guess that it's an indication of how widely used Locus is, and even with the current restrictions (which IMO weren't very restrictive) the sheer number of users who might be grabbing tiles at any time are going to upset the OSM folks.  Only thing I could think of is further restricting Locus, perhaps X number of tiles per day and X number of tiles at once.  Setting up your own tile server would be a pretty big drain, it'd require a dedicated server, fast connection, and lots of bandwidth.  

In one way I see their point, they're probably always on the lookout for heavy access against their server and blocking anything which seems to be scraping it, but IMO they're missing part of the point in that they would want their maps to be widely used.  I've always had a bit of a sour taste from OSM and have always had more issues getting reliable or reasonably fast data back from it from various clients.  Even their website is slow, regardless of their restrictions.  I tried to draw a new bike path here once and i completely gave up on it, it took forever and the tools were horrible.

Sadly I have downloaded (over a few weeks of time) my town and a few I geocache in, and wouldn't want to re-download all of that from Mapquest or other sources.  I assume the database data already in place will continue to work?

My experience is that GPS built into phones suck.  Use a bluetooth GPS if you want accuracy

Sounds good so far.

My top priority would be the display of N closest geocaches (= active POIs). A list or a method to access them on a custom screen.

I do not do PQs, I have my closest caches in .GPX file, that I can upload to my web page. So a configurable "PQ server" (=web url/xyz.zip) would be nice.

Okay, I'm confused  You don't do PQ's, but you have your caches in a GPX.  You create the GPX manually, or from loc files, or?

BTW, is anyone here using bcaching?  I have my caches copied there, but I really never use it either.  But what tools I've had which can use bcaching can also directly access GC.com so I've never had to either I guess.

Installed version 1.13.3 today.
- Thank you so much for implementing my suggestion of a new status line with user selectable contents on the navigation screen.

Where is this?  I have been looking around to see what it's about but not seeing it?

There's a couple apps on the android market that claim to do the map calibration on-phone from a picture. Some free ones even:

https://market.android.com/details?id=c ... Calibrator
https://market.android.com/details?id=c ... ika&rdot=1
https://market.android.com/details?id=c ... rch_result

Probably don't have all the features of locus, but if you want this one particular thing it might be good.

Maprika  works really well for this.  You can calibrate directly in the app against Google Maps.  I was at a large park here a few months ago, wife and kid were in line for something so I got on the tablet, googled a map, loaded up Maprika, spent about 10 minutes putting matching points and then I had a nice geo-calibrated map to use for the park.

Awesome!!  That'll help a lot with 1000 waypoint PQ's that won't get emailed out, I have stuck with 500's so far so they can get emailed, and honestly probably will continue to do it (I combine some 20 PQ's into one master then split out into areas around my state with no dups) but I can see this being really useful to download PQ's I don't currently have.

Here's a list of what I'd really like to have, not available in G4L..

Refresh of current geocache (latest coordinates, logs, etc are usually what I'm after, but update the whole record)
Logging of geocaches (F, DNF, Note, Needs Maintenance, _AND_ Owner Maintenance if possible)
Logging of pickup/dropoff/visit/discover of Travel Bugs (not sure if this is in the API or not)

That reminds me..  I don't do a LOT with Travel Bugs, but does Locus support them at all?  It'd be nice if there some Travel Bug inventory for waypoints (per cache record in PQ) and for the user (assuming user would have to input them, then Locus could mark them as in inventory or not).  It'd also be nice to be able to log picking up a travel bug while logging a cache.  Or an associated request I saw in another thread; the ability to take a picture and add it to a geocache or waypoint, I tend to take pictures of travel bugs and their tags.

BTW, to expand on the logging requests above, I'd love to be able to do Owner Maintenance on the fly on the phone, in fact for some reason this seems to be the on-the-fly logging I do most often in order to get the cache back online.

just one hint, to merge sqlite maps, just create subfolder in locus/maps directory and put maps you want merge into this folder

I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing what he means is that the subdir will show as the Map, then it'll use any within there...  

But I doubt it's going to merge two sets of the same map into one map, just to clarify, since that's what my post was about.