Navigator 2 Wishlist

DavidW · Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 6:43 pm Post subject:

You need to complete Darren's suggestion, which is to go into the Backlight controls of your machine (via Settings on the Start Menu), and select the backlight not to go off when on external power.

This isn't a problem in most cases - particularly as on most Pocket PCs, a long press of the power button turns the backlight off, and another long press turns it back on again. This is certainly the case on my iPAQ 3970, and may be the answer for those of you who want to turn the backlight off on your Pocket PC when it is cradled.

David

Pagemakers · Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 7:33 pm Post subject:

Pagemakers · Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 7:39 pm Post subject:

3 More suggestions for the wish list:

1 - A line on the navigation page that tells you the road you are 'currently' on. At the moment only the 'next' road to turn into is displayed (which is not what the manual says should be displayed).

2 - Another icon in Pocket PC's program's menu called "Simulation". Clicking the simulation mode should not require the Bluetooth connection and simply allows you to simulate routes/setup the software without the hassle of connecting to the GPS receiver first.

3 - I know I've said it elsewhere but an option to "keep the backlight on", overriding the PDA's 'turn backlight off after x mins on battery power' in the PDA's settings menu. Media player does this when playing movies.

DavidW · Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 10:46 pm Post subject:

Pagemakers,

Number 1 has caused a lot of confusion and various suggestions from various people.

With a map on screen and navigation off, the name of the road you're currently on is displayed. With navigation on, when you're in the "safety screen", both the name of the current and the next road are displayed.

However, with a map on screen and navigation on, you get the name of the next road. Personally, I think that's more useful than the name of the current road - though many have wished for the name of the current road. I find having the name of the next road can be helpful if there's lots of roads close together (or with poor GPS coverage, as can happen in city centres) - knowing the name of the road you're looking for can help you turn correctly.

I think the consensus is that if there's only room for the name of one road with a map on screen and navigation on, people would like to be able to configure it to show the current road rather than the next one. I'd stick with the next road displayed if I had the choice - having thought it through, that's more useful to my way of thinking.

Number 2 - arguably this is a bug in the current software (I think it's actually in the GPS driver). It should allow you to simulate without trying to open the connection to the GPS. It's equally as annoying for those of us who use CompactFlash GPSes, and I hope the bug is fixed. At that point, I don't think an extra icon is needed, though you may disagree!

Number 3 - I'm no expert on the internals of Windows CE, but I took a look at the documentation on MSDN. So far as I can tell, there's no special interface for an application to control the backlight directly. There are IOCTLs that can do this in desktop Windows if the driver support is present on the system - but they only arrived very recently (Windows XP Service Pack 1 or later for desktop Windows, Windows Server 2003 for server Windows).

So far as I can tell, the best that could be done is direct changing of the Backlight settings in the registry. I'm not sure whether an application could change the settings, then issue the event the Control Panel does when they're changed on the backlight control panel that should make the backlight driver pick this up. Certainly this is not a documented method for applications, and might just cause problems on some hardware. It appears that only the timer values are standardised in this way in any case - not the backlight levels - though that sounds as if that would give you what you want.

I'm not aware precisely what Media Player does - but if you have a registry editor to hand, you could take a look at the values in \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Backlight - particularly the BatteryTimeout and ACTimeout values. This may require use of the remote registry editor in the SDK, however - for any edits may only stick when Media Player is "on top".

There's a potential issue if more than one application starts editing these values - depending on the order that you start and quit the applications, you may find the value lands up being restored to a 'wrong' value. I don't know whether there's any way to use the event system to try to prevent this.

It may be that Media Player uses some undocumented interface to keep the backlight on.

Personally, I don't find it too much of a problem to have the backlight timeout disabled when on external power. I appreciate this isn't ideal for some, though.

David

Pagemakers · Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 11:10 pm Post subject:

David thanks for your comprehensive reply.

Regarding option 1, I think there is enough room at the top of the navigation display to have a line similar to the bottom which could display the road you were currently on. It could also replace the "show next motorway" banner (as it is sort of doing the same thing but more comprehensively.

Personally I would have the line at the bottom indicating the road you were currently on and the line at the top displaying your next road.

Regaining the simulation "bug", I have also found that if I simulate a route, then stop the simulation and ask it to simulate another route I get the error "Can not start simulation (2)". I have to soft reset my PDA to get the simulation working again.

Cessquill · Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 9:14 pm Post subject:

Pagemakers - I'm in agreeance with you. There are times when the current road is useful on the navigation page. If there is only room for one, then giving the user the option might be a result.

When I need the name of the current road, I tap the screen to bring up the options. That lists the current location at the bottom.

With regards to the backlight - I think there's a couple of issues here where the underlying operating system is at fault. For example, one of the pocket pc's options is to keep the machine on when it's on external power. This isn't strictly true, since it actually keeps your machine on when it's connected for syncing. If you try your PPC in a vehicle whilst on charge without running GPS software sometimes it stays on, sometimes it doesn't. Well, it does on mine anyhow (I'm having a rant day today about my PPC for not being able to keep the time or run alarms - a system that's so fundamentally flawed shouldn't ever get past beta testing Evil or Very Mad

).

Anyhow - back on to more suggestions...

- As an advancement to entering via points in a journey I'd like to enter a series of places to visit and let TTN decide which is the quickest order to do them in.
- I'd like it to constantly 'learn' and recalibrate its calculations based on how long it actually takes to travel down certain roads. When online navigating becomes more feasible I'd like the opportunity to automatically upload this data somewhere so everybody's navigation software would automatically benefit from everybody else's experiences. Sure, initially there would be some skewed results and some trial and errors, but eventually it'd settle down and give a much more accurate journey time and direct route. I appreciate that for now this is ambitious, but heck, why not. If you're going down that route, then collecting time of day and type of vehicle information would improve it further (as would on-line maps, roadwork, accident and conjestion information). The more these systems talk to each other, the more reliable they become, the more people adopt them, the better they are, etc......
- I think I have mentioned this before (or somebody has), but the ability to give you the start of the journey before calculating/recalculating is complete. Say, for eample, I was calculating a journey from the middle of Harrow into Peterborough, and I didn't know where I was (since I'd got there from Croydon). I enter my requirements whilst my GPS unit is acquiring its position. My current situation depicts that it's not really feasible to sit there and wait for a signal, then wait for a calculation (I'm buried within a multi-storey). Therefore, I have to drive. As soon as I get out of the car park, I have to keep going, so I take a guess. I drive down the road a little until a position is fixed (not long) and it starts calculating a route. Due to the nature of the journey it takes a long while to calculate. I'm still driving. Still guessing. Middle of London. Once the route's calculated, TTN decides that I've been going in the wrong direction. Immediately a recalculate is instigated. This takes a long time too. I'm in the middle of London on a Friday afternoon (and I'm not great at that), and all I want is for my navigation system to get me going whilst it works out the rest of a route. Mathematically I appreciate that the algorithm needs to do an entire journey in one pass to ensure it's got the best one, but at the time I just needed to get going a little - even if it wasn't absolutely the best route. Maybe a first draft route to get me going whilst it sorted out the best route in the background.
- A ability to stop me from unplugging the GPS unit in the boot when I put stuff in there, and wonder why my signal drops to nothing an hour down the road :D

Maybe I've just got too much time to stop and think now that my iPaq is doing all the legwork for me. :D
_________________
What's going on? Where am I?

Cessquill · Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 11:53 am Post subject:

- Now that the mapping companies are starting to include speed data, then the ability to display/warn you of the current speed limit. I know that these things are going to impact on the overall size of the map (as would putting the entire postcode on in an independant field, which I'm all for), but things like this are always evolving, and it shouldn't be tied to space constraints. When I started with a Psion, a Garmin and StreetPlanner & RoutePlanner, the most I could fit on was something like 8mb. SD/CF cards are always getting bigger and coming down in price, and on-line navigating is starting to look like a feasability (albeit at a cost).

- This is a bit of a pipe dream (and beyone the realms of TTN wishlist), but if TomTom released some software that performed the same or similar functions to the Nokia 610 http://www.nokia.co.uk/nokia/0,,48778,00.htm then I'd be made up. I know there's other mobile phone software on the market, but it's a bit of a bind trying to get it to work alongside Navigator easily. If TomTom released a Travel Suite that included the navigation software and a bluetooth mobile phone companion, and all the software could talk to each other (the navigator using a car-kit's sound, easily and automatically switch between the two utilities), then I'd buy a dedicated iPaq.
_________________
What's going on? Where am I?

matt_e · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 10:11 pm Post subject:

Don't know if this is earlier in the thread (it's a very long thread to read!!).

Better average speeds for roads (or portions).

Could have for each portion:

Morning rush hour e.g. 8am to 10am
Daytime 10am to 4pm
Evening rush hour e.g. 4pm to 7pm
Overnight 7pm to 8am

Users could contribute their best estimates for different portions of roads at different times and for each category they could be averaged over time. If the data didn't exist it could default to the current user defined values.

Matt

Cessquill · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 10:31 pm Post subject:

Agreed - 2 posts up, but explained badly :D
_________________
What's going on? Where am I?

matt_e · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 10:51 pm Post subject:

Doh! After reading a couple of pages I got lazy and thought I'd just add my wish to the end. Sorry to have missed yours Cessquill. Yep - same idea.
Matt Thumbs Up

benyyy · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jan 26, 2004 Posts: 16

i definatley agree with seeing traffic lights and mini islands on screen
but would also like to see a better setup for the prefered routing, in other words ask you if you would prefere motorway driving or a sceniic route but calculating as the way it works now is a bit poor to say the least as for example if set to shortest route it will try to keep as straight a line as possible with the consequence of trying to take you down dead ends.
does anyone have microsoft autoroute for pc because if you do you will understand what i mean when i say that usual creates a realistic route to take and TTN should be able to do similar.
I believe if these software developers want to stand out from the crowd then they should make an efffort to listen to there customers and take on board what is being said after all it can only benifit them in the long run financially.
TT should also tell you when to go straight on a T Junctions (i.e. traffic lights and the like) as i want to be able to consentrate more on driving rather than looking at the screen to check where i am going just because TT decides to stay silent because it assumes you must go straight on if nothing is said. I am sure i am not the only one that has double checked there screen to see if it is still working because of long periods of silence.
This is a basic road safety issue that is not being considered by the developers and possitively encourages you to keep looking at the screen instead of where your going. (CRASH BANG WALLOP)

Cessquill · Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2004 3:01 pm Post subject:

'scool matt_e. I know what you mean about skimming. :D

Incidentally, can we claim copyright or royalties if any of these hit the final release?! Laughing

Definitely the option of verbal warnings where you've got to go straight on. Perhaps just one warning though? Don't know. I guess it's sometimes how clever the algorithm is and how accurate the maps are. There's a place near me that it always asks me to turn left at, when in reality it's continuing down the same road. Vice Versa, there's times when I'm driving and there's clearly an interesting junction coming up and a little bit of help would be much appreciated.

Maybe "take the left fork" or "centre fork" or whatever. There's some roads in Leicester that just split into equal and close forks, and you get no indication as to which one you take, since the map sees it as staying on the same road. To a newbie on that road, it's not always clear which the same road is. Without looking down at the screen. Whilst you're driving down what will soon be two dual carriageways. At rush hour. In Leicester.

Crash, Bang, Wallop. What a video.
_________________
What's going on? Where am I?

wallisj · Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2004 6:05 pm Post subject:

Most of the 8 pages of suggestions are very well thought out and intelligent ideas which could make any GPS/SatNav package outstanding.....do we have any idea if TomTom are taking any notice of them and incorporating some/all of them into a new release (V2 upgrade or V3)?

Just that this app hasn't undergone even a minor update in a very long time now.

Just wondering

Cessquill · Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2004 8:12 pm Post subject:

DavidW · Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2004 11:33 am Post subject:

I suspect Navigator 2 has been code frozen for some time. TomTom themselves have dropped various hints (in replies from Tech Support to various people) that Navigator 3 for the Pocket PC is coming - though there's no details at present.

Navigator for the Palm Tungsten 3 (due out sometime in February) may give some fairly good hints as to what may be coming in the next Pocket PC version.

David

	PocketGPS
	Web