Oops. Found battery drain reason!

It was kinda silly. Battery was draining due to not unregistering compass sensor. Implementation was not finished, but parts of code slipped to release. Next release with fixes and goodies is on it's way. Stay tuned.
And please please please, don't just post in market comments with bugs. Send me an email so I can fix it :)

Fasten your seat-belts. Development is speeding up!

It might be that end of outdoor season or increased caffeine stimulation that makes development of Maps (-) progressing faster than average user would probably want to care :) I think that iteration cycles for new version would be around 2 weeks from now, even though there are enough changes for new release every week.
The most asked feature by now was "Driving directions" and "Address search". Well, I would start from "search" as it seems like an entry to routing. Considering that address search should work offline (or what is the purpose of offline app anyway?) this would require quite a caching of OSM data to device. Hopefully, I'll figure scalability of cache by the time the data format is finalized and cache will not flood entire SD card :)

Ad-free version is ready for consumption

Google has finally let Canadian developers make money on Android Market. Soooo..., here we go! Paid and absolutely ads-free version of the Maps (-) went to market. It's renamed to Maps (+) and published by Coderminus. Yeah, I had to open another dev account and let google dev team figure out how to make merchant address read/write in their database. So, now I'm coderminus (all lowercase) and Coderminus (capitalized). Just to add even more confusion to the fact that Maps (-) together with Maps (+) are so hard to discover using search engine. :)
Download page of has a 2D barcode of paid app. I'll update Maps (-) with menu item to direct market link as well. Maps (+) is surprisingly faster and smaller than (-) version. Dropping AdLibrary makes it so much more agile.

Testing GPS layer on the go.

I've been driving 600 km lately to reach my vacation destination. Well, I should thank myself for the effort to implement GPS track overlay for the next version and having it on my dev phone. Even though it still requires some optimization, the result is absolutely bright. I've saved route generated by online google maps to "My Maps" and than saved to GPX file using http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/ to SD card. Not very strait-forward. That's why I like idea of having direct import from "My Maps".

It's not all that bright day after all

Driving with Maps (-) around and testing with caching my coming vacation trip, I may say that my developer satisfaction is fading away. Somehow the color of navigation marker now blends with all the maps I try and it's even not safe to check location as it requires more than it should time to understand where marker is. Agrrr. Need another color for this one. Or, may be, some animation. 

Another annoying news is the slowness of the queuing algorithm. Especially with google maps, when server is very fast, it downloads almost with the same speed as queuing. So counter just jumps back and forth. Not good. 

One other thing I now need is a separate queue for each map source. I've been riding the train and looking around on the map. Some tiles where missing so queue picked them up and I thought I'll just cache them when I get to wifi spot. And than I needed to check something on OSM map. And my queue is gone. Surely, c'os switching is clearing the queue. That's it. Separate queue for each map source.

There are also some sqlite crashes reported that shouldn't happen. Would have to look at stabilization of this new approach to queuing. 

Cache queue would go to persistent database

After some experimenting with saving/restoring of cache queue, the final design is to have cache queue constantly living in database. There is a "Clear queue" menu option to clean it up. It makes cache controllable. The only concern now is that populating of the queue on "Cache area" is quite slow. It's writing to the database instead of memory. Personally I could leave with it, should probably disable "Cache area" menu entry for the time when recursive algorithm is still working. 

Will try to release new version tonight. There is annoying accuracy circle I need to recalculate so it scales closer to reality.

Remembering tile cache queue btwn restarts

I knew it wasn't prefect. Now it's getting on the way. Cache queue is cleaned after application sent to sleep on screen off or switching to other application. Well, it's not very usable this way. Would have to fix it right away. 

Really need GPS track recording

Alright, I've been testing my favorite Android application over the weekends. Mostly biking in hope to add more bike-friendly trails to my neighborhood openstreetmap.org data. The way I do it now is launching google made MyTracks and than saving to .gpx file for later upload to OSM. Well, this time everything went wrong. GPS signal was quite weak, the map shown disappeared from that small in-memory cache that stock phone map application is using, track stopped recording in the middle without decent warning. It was quite frustrating to make 30 km worse or park-forest trails and not have a record I wished for.  The positive side of this exercise (beside doing biking exercise is positive thing anyway :)) was decision and motivation to add GPS recording/displaying to Maps (-). This way I could stay in my app during trips and, who knows, may be come up with some innovative way of dealing with GPS tracks.

Mobile ads are back in app

I've released v.1.7.0 with bunch of performance and bug fixes. The big deal for me personally was to enable browsing and caching on the fly while cache queue is busy processing big recursive area tiles saving.
I've introduced mobile ads in this version. It starts to show and occupy top 50 pixels of the screen at the time when caching queue reaches 30 tiles. Well, I hope it's not very annoying. This approach in monetizing might prove itself not worst the hassle though. Will see. By number of reasons paid-no-ads version is not coming to market at least yet.

New web-home for Maps (-)

Maps (-) got a new home on the web. maps.coderminus.com This was one pending project to compensate absence of in-application help system.

Old news are located at http://coderminus.blogspot.com/