Google is retiring its Latitude location-sharing service on August 9th
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Please visit http://TeleportMe.to if you are are looking for a super simple on foot navigation (just follow the arrow) with ability to save places (called teleports) and share them easily with your friends through text, email, facebook or twitter. Any comments are welcome. We will be also enabling users to use nice vanilla links to places such as http://TeleportMe.to/StarbucksGdynia
We planned to show it on HN after releasing Android and few updates as not all planned features are already there, but screw that
Crash: we will take a look into that today, thank's for the tip.
Website: it's launchrock and yes it's slow. We've just removed one script, should be better (but not perfect). We will have to final
In any case I'm pasting direct appstore link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/teleportme/id663199958
P.S. My friend just tested all sharing options on his iPhone5 - worked fine. It must have been some random crash in your case. Nevertheless it will be visible in our statistics.
P.S. regarding 6 crashes during mail share - we've tested it again while connected to wifi, everything is working OK. Neverthless our ios dev is aware of this and will take a look into stats
When we made the move to mobile devices, we took a major step backwards in the maturity of technology. Some days I miss the simplicity of only having to pick between Windows Mobile and Palm OS when choosing a mobile audience.
Try being a Linux user on a PowerPC box.
I hope developers, most of which have become mobile developers by now, have now understood that open protocols are much more important than application availability.
It may makes commercial sense for businesess to act like doubt (I seriously doubt that holds in the long run), but the more they do that, the more private developers understand the importance of open protocols.
Tried out the G+ version just now, pretty shit in comparison. The feature set it pretty non existent, I can't take advantage of Maps' directions and there doesn't seem to be a way to pop their location out onto the main Maps app. Poor form Google :( At least make the replacing solution on par.
I used latitude to do coordinate based geolocation. So on the map of the park, I see my spouse is around one mile from the intersection of the red hiking trail and the blue hiking trail, OK I'll head over that direction and we'll meet up for lunch.
In the G+ app, at least so far at a glance, I can only check into street addresses and the like. Or I can write reviews. Thanks, I already know I'm at the state park, and I don't want to check into the gas station across the street from the entrance.
Its very interesting that geolocation is focusing on "asphalt people" and abandoning outdoorsmen. Its depressing there are "geo" apps that have the worldview that human beings can only physically move via paved roads and airports.
One side of me admires Google for all that they do for "free" but I sometimes wish they would put the phone users in the customer role and maybe these products would evolve.
Am I the only one that would like to see a shared platform with documents, messaging, and location?
I would GLADLY pay a monthly fee to sync up our family between Android,iPhone, and web. Things like, grocery lists, to-do lists, events, photos, reference documents, and the ability to see where we are so we can plan the day w/out having to ask "Where are you?" or me sending a text every day, "OMW home". They're all there now, with things like Google Docs, Evernote, Dropbox, etc, but with kids and a non-tech minded wife, the pieces don't fall into place easy.
They're not too far away really. G+ is their plan to do this.
Are there any location-tracking alternatives (I don't care about sharing it with friends) for iOS that offer KML/GPX export and are battery-friendly?
edit: I've just noticed that Glympse has been recommended a few times in this thread already. I predict downloads for Glympse will sky-rocket over the coming days / weeks.
http://www.gpsautoresponder.com/
It takes a different approach to sharing location: Anyone with the possession of the generated link can get the device's location and the device owner is notified about it.
The android app and the web service are both open-source so you can improve it and even host this on your own server and have the ultimate privacy.
And when you think about it, why shouldn't the location of your friends not be just another layer in the maps app? Seems like a logical place to be able to find this kind of information.
But Google really, really wants to break into that market. Now what's happening is simply that they're sacrificing their less profitable services in order to force people to start using Google+, in an attempt to get over that network effect threshold.
Complete nonsense. Google aren't competing with Facebook directly at all! What they are doing is making Google+ the backend for any person to person interaction across their services. Instead of caring about massive amounts of features, they're just enabling all of their existing products, slimming and integrating them where possible.
If people can't be bothered to open an app and tap on the screen a few times then really nobody should be aiming at that market. Wanting a system where you just mash a button on your phone and it magically works is detrimental to actual useful features.
Like hell they aren't.
> What they are doing is making Google+ the backend for any person to person interaction across their services.
I.e. a competition to Facebook.
> If people can't be bothered to open an app and tap on the screen a few times then really nobody should be aiming at that market. Wanting a system where you just mash a button on your phone and it magically works is detrimental to actual useful features.
I can't even tell what that's a strawman of.
Since when has Facebook been the backend for interaction across Facebook's services? That's nonsense.
The closest Google+ gets to Facebook is that they both allow you to share content between friends. Google wants it to be the backend to the various features like Maps, Search, Mail. Facebook on the other hand wants to be the frontend, the site that you go to.
If I can't convince you then I'm really not bothered, Google have made it very clear what they're doing and why they're doing it. Perhaps view some of the session videos from IO.
When Google cancels the separate service and folds it into G+, as with Latitude, as with Reader, then it becomes the frontend as well. I fail to see a substantial difference.
> Google have made it very clear what they're doing and why they're doing it. Perhaps view some of the session videos from IO.
Perhaps start entertaining the notion that what people say they do (and especially why) isn't necessarily what they do (and especially why).
They also had an accelerated and supposedly more accurate tracking option on demand (i.e. I could request my wife's location to be updated "in real time"). That never worked very well and was removed.
Its the same with sites that only have a Facebook login. Goodbye.
I was quite a fan of finding how far I'd walked, but Google Now tells me that once a month now.
I compared the results of my phone's pedometer function (which seems to be quite accurate) to Google Now's walk reports, and the distances Google Now gave were wrong by an order of magnitude ... soooo, pretty much useless... ><
[I've no idea how Google Now tries to calculate this, but whatever method it uses seems to be absolutely awful...]
I don't know exactly how it works, but I think it uses the accelerometer to count steps like a traditional pedometer.
There seem to be a ton of other pedometer apps in the play store, though I don't know how well they work.