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Comment by jonschwartz | Hacker News Reader

Couple of quick thoughts after installing:

1) It appears to be continuously getting GPS data. That will kill my battery. Dead battery = I'm late anyway I may need to uninstall until this is fixed.

2) I don't need to be reminded of everything on every calendar I have access to. Have it so I can select which calendar I need to bounce for.

3) Along the same lines of 2, allow me to ignore specific events. I subscribe to a couple general holiday calendars and I don't need to be told when to leave for "Memorial Day" or whatever.

Otherwise, great concept. I look forward to keeping up with your progress.

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With regards to issue #1. The drain of numerous applications using the GPS hardware on the phone and thus killing battery life makes me wish Google Latitude had an API that devs could use to request my GPS co-ordinates. If you can login via Facebook why can't you do location via Latitude ?

Yeah that makes perfect sense. Have Android handle the actual GPS interaction and allow app developers to poll for that info. Then, have a global setting in the phone's settings that says how often it can poll the GPS. Get on it, Google!

http://code.google.com/apis/latitude/

I haven't looked at it super closely, but could the interested parties let me know what's missing? I'll forward your feedback to the right people.

I don't know how I missed this. Everything I was thinking seems to be included. The only potential feature that it lacks is access to information on users other than myself, such as would be available through the web interface. I can see numerous reasons, however, as to why Google would not expose this information through an API.

Big thanks for the feedback Jon.

1. Bounce doesn't actually (at least it isn't supposed to) use your GPS all the time. It should poll for updates every 30 minutes until it gets closer to when you need to leave, then we ask for updates the closer we get to your "Bounce time."

2. Yeah, we'll make it smarter so you can customize which events it notifies you for and which it doesn't.

Thanks again.

Sure thing.

1) Hmmm is there some sort of timeout if it can't get the location via GPS? I'm in a room with no sky view so it can't effectively get the location via GPS. It seems to me like it never gives up if it can't find the location (maybe I'm wrong, that's just a guess).

2) It'll be way more awesome when you can do that.

Keep up the good work!

We'll try it out in a place where we can't get a GPS signal make it better. Thanks again.

If I do not have any appointments all weekend you are going to poll my location from 8pm friday till 6am monday for no reason all?

Yeah, the GPS thing is surprising. My understanding of Android development is limited but doesn't Location Manager allow for cell/wifi location detection? I'd really like to see this with GPS as an optional or last resort fallback.

For instance, I'm here in my office and have no GPS coverage and bounce is stumped.

Neat idea, needs better execution, looking foward to updates.

EDIT: One other point of feedback. I have an appointment at the Panama Hotel in Seattle. That appointment shows up in Calendar and maps figured out the location without a problem, but Bounce thinks I'm going to Panama. The republic. Is there any way to pull this from Maps?

Thanks for the feedback. It should get your location from the network if GPS isn't working. Will look into it.

Yeah, place lookups are really rough now - that's really high on our priority list. Forthcoming version versions will be much better.

Thanks again.

Props for dealing with the feedback in this thread so quickly and sorry for turning HN into a low fidelity bug tracker. I promise to submit future bug reports in a more useful manner.

Fwiw, folks, this is staying on my phone. One of the great things about the android marketplace is I can expect this will be updated sooner rather than later.

+1 for the lack of friction in the Android Marketplace.

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