Friday, December 23, 2011

RemoteAndroid 1.0.7

New version of RemoteAndroid to make it support Android 1.5 only, i.e. remove the commands to turn on and off GPS.

I also added support for Skyhook Wireless. I'm not sure how useful that is, but it was easy to do and probably doesn't do any harm.

My opinion of Skyhook is that it's a bit useless on Android because it doesn't integrate well with the other location providers (network and gps) - it doesn't tell you which method it used for getting location so there's no way to compare with the built-in methods to see which is best. Perhaps you can figure it out - if nap is zero that means it used GPS so you can ignore it, if nap is greater than zero then it used wireless so you can compare a combination of time and accuracy to decide whether it's better than the Android network location.
PS: if you're wondering what nap means, don't look in the Skyhook API documentation because it's pretty useless. The answer is "number of access points". PS2: there's no corresponding attribute for "number of satellites".
Skyhook's answer is to just use them instead of the Android API, but there's two reason's not to do that:
1. Skyhook's wireless coverage is worse than Android's, except in some built-up areas of America.
2. Skyhook only provides reverse geolocation for America.
So you'd really need to use all your options, and then go through hoops to make it consistent with the Android location provider.
But nevertheless I'm glad to see that Skyhook is supporting Android. I just hope that more developers try to use it and provide feedback to Skyhook so that they can modify it to make it more useful.