Roundabout

Roundabout is a general-purpose location-based assistant.

It consists of two main components: a service that runs “in the background”, and a user interface.

The link on Google Play.

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Your First Time

Hopefully you are reading this at some point before giving up, or better yet, before you start!

When you start Roundabout for the first time, only the Weather program is enabled. The service notification (on the phone’s status bar) will confirm this.

If you have contacts with street addresses, they can be imported; you must toggle the setting in the Settings screen.

Once imported, contacts appear on the map. You can use the Landmarks Screen to drill into this information.

When you have a GPS fix, your position should appear on the map. You can have your position reverse-geocoded; you must toggle the setting in the Settings Screen.

At this point, you should customise Settings, and enable the activities you are interested in. Use the Menu key, select Activities, navigate to the activity in the list you want, use the Menu key, and select Toggle Activity. You should note the change in state in the Activity List. Use the Back key to return to the Workspace.

The Weather activity should update within several minutes of starting the system, if you are connected to Wifi and have a valid GPS location.

Please see the topics on the Plugins below for more details.

In version 2.0.2, the default settings are changed to minimize any reverse-geocoding. For first-time install, this reduces the initial startup delay.

These can be changed in the Settings screen.

Since map tiles are not shared across applications, there is an additional delay while the Google Map downloads initial tiles for your location.

Once downloaded, these are kept on your phone for fast access.

Landmarks

Roundabout represents GPS locations of interest as Landmarks.

Your Contacts List is used if enabled; this is controlled from the Preferences screen.
Any contacts which you provide a Street Address for are automatically geocoded and displayed on the map.

Roundabout stores your landmarks internally, and allows you to associate content (e.g. contact, image, calendar) with that landmark, so you can link to it.

When it imports a contact as a landmark, it automatically puts that contact into the landmark’s content list.

Current Location

Central to most Activities is the concept of Current Location. This is obtained from the GPS of your phone.

The Current Location is kept updated based on settings in the Preferences screen. There are two settings: time and distance. You must consider the tradeoff between battery usage and accuracy.

Roundabout takes great efforts to keep the GPS radio off when you are not moving. This accomplished by performing motion checks, and turning off the GPS when it is determined the phone is not moving.

The motion check requires a full wake of your phone, to activate the necessary sensors. The frequency of this is controlled in the Preferences screen.

In the User Interface portion, the Current Location plugin displays your Speed, Bearing, and GPS positon, reverse-geocoding it if you have that enabled.

Remember that reverse-geocoding uses your data network and may incur cost.

The location text of the Current Location plugin has a shadow color that indicates the quality of the position “fix”.

  • Green indicates “very accurate”. Street address should be spot-on.
  • Yellow indicates “somewhat accurate”. Street address may be correct, or just nearby.
  • Red indicates “not accurate”. Street address given should not be trusted.

Take this into account if you have reverse-geocoding enabled.

Workspace Screen

The primary Screen in Roundabout is called The Workspace. There are other application-level Screens that display specific information that is also displayed in the Workspace.

The background of the Workspace is the Google Map Control.

At the bottom of the Screen are the Map controls and the Plugin Content Carousel.

Each plugin may provide a Content View, that is rotated along with the Plugin Control UI. A Short Click provides the “default” action; a Long Click provides the Plugin Context Menu, if it has one.

Plugins may have other graphical elements; these appear as docked windows at one of the four edges of the workspace, or a Map Overlay.

Please see the Image Gallery for examples of the workspace.

Landmark Content Screen

The Landmark Content Screen is a top-level screen, meaning you can launch it from the Home Screen, or make a shortcut for it.

This screen displays all of the Dynamic Landmark Content that is active.

The Gallery at the top presents several common sort orders to choose from.

Dynamic Landmark Content

This feature uses your Landmarks as a list of names and locations to hunt for matching content in other parts of your phone: Call Log, Messaging, Gallery, Calendar.

This is accomplished by matching key fields of each type of content against your Landmark names. Likewise, it attempts to match geotagged content (e.g. geotagged photos) to the nearest Landmark.

This information shows up in two places: in the Landmarks Plugin of the Workspace Screen, and in the Landmark Content Screen.

The Landmarks Plugin has an option to display Landmark Content, which is Off by default. Use the Settings Screen to change it.

Voice Commands

Activate Voice Commands in one of two ways:

  1. Use the Call key.
  2. Use the command in the Options menu (via the Menu key).

The Record graphic displays on the Plugin bar, indicating the system is in Voice Command mode.

This feature uses the standard Voice Recognition Screen shared by all applications. Just speak normally, or use the Cancel button to give up.

Here are some commands:

  • In: Zoom In.
  • Out: Zoom Out.
  • Lock: Screen Lock/Unlock.
  • Traffic: Traffic overlay on/off.
  • Satellite: Satellite overlay on/off.
  • Plugin “name”: Toggle plugin on/off, e.g. “plugin wayfinder”.

The system gives you feedback if the Tools are visible. First, it displays what was captured by Voice Recognition, and whether that was an accepted command. If accepted, the command itself is carried out, and provides confirmation or error.

Rendezvous Screen

Roundabout provides you with an application-level Screen to access and control the Rendezvous Activity, when you are not using the Workspace Screen.

The settings are saved in the preferences, and restored to the UI when you activate this screen (or the plugin’s corresponding dialog in the Workspace). You must still use the Apply button to send the current settings to the Roundabout engine.

Use the Toggle Activity button to control when the Rendezvous activity is running. The screen displays the current active state of the activity.

Enabling the Rendezvous activity turns on your GPS for the duration it is on. Be sure to turn off Rendezvous after you have reached your destination.

Your Battery

Roundabout gives you great control over how aggressively it tracks your location using the GPS. This directly affects your battery usage. The default settings are reasonable, but you must decide yourself the accuracy/battery-life tradeoff.

Roundabout is extremely careful about using resources like GPS. The Wayfinder and Rendezous activities are the only ones that activate GPS; the Weather activity uses your Last Known Location, which does not engage the GPS.

With that said, only when one or both of Wayfinder/Rendezvous are enabled, does your GPS become involved.

The Motion Detect feature completely disengages the GPS when your phone is sitting still, and re-engages it when it detects motion. How frequently this activates is controlled by you; go to the Settings screen.

The Rendezvous and Wayfinder activities are meant as situational; turn them on when you use them, otherwise they are turned off.

The Workspace screen makes active use of the GPS, since it is displaying your Current Location in several ways; on the map, and in the Current Location plugin view.

How frequently this updates is controlled by you; go to the Settings screen.

GPS Accuracy

Since many features of Roundabout take accuracy into account, a quick discussion is in order.

All units are in metric.

In general, each GPS “fix” or “reading” has more data associated with it than just the Longitude and Latitude: Time, Speed, Bearing, and Accuracy are the others.

Most of these values are displayed by the Current Location plugin.

The Accuracy value is very important, because it tells us how “good” the fix is, in distance. For example, an Accuracy of 10 is very good (and typical), and Accuracy of 1609 would be very bad (and commonly occurs). In the latter case, GPS thinks I’m One Mile Away from my real position!

As a result, the system typically “throws out” these inaccurate readings, except for the Current Location plugin, which color-codes the Accuracy.

Roundabout Service

The service portion of Roundabout is meant to be always-running, and by default, starts when your phone starts.

This part of the system is totally event-driven, so it only does work when something it is interested in happens, and the Android system notifies it. If all the activities are off, the service is not doing anything to consume power.

This is a benefit for you, but potentially bad news for your phone’s battery, because when activities are enabled, there is extra load on the phone.

To conserve power, the Roundabout service is configured by default to terminate when the phone’s Battery Low warning goes off.

You can also terminate the Roundabout service directly from the Settings screen. The service will restart the next time you trigger it.

Activities

The service runs modules called “activities”. Each activity serves a purpose, e.g. Get the Weather.

Each activity is Enabled or Disabled. When enabled, the activity performs its function.

An activity is split into two modules: triggers and tasks.

Triggers are filters that monitor for a specific set of conditions, e.g. Network Available, and “fire” when the filter detects its conditions are valid.

Tasks are the actions that occur, e.g. Reconnect Wifi, in response to triggers firing.

Plugins

The various components of the user interface are divided into plugins, which you can manage independently.

Plugins usually have a service component.

Rendezvous

The Rendezvous plugin allows you to enter a landmark, list of phone numbers, and a message.

These are used to trigger an SMS message when you reach proximity of the indicated landmark.

Wayfinder

The Wayfinder plugin tracks your Current Location over time, and plots it on the map, along with Total Distance.

A maximum of 400 points are kept.

Your location is tracked even if the phone is in “standby” mode, and does not require the Workspace to be running, except to view the track.

The Wayfinder plugin takes the GPS accuracy into account when adding to the track. This is to make the track less jagged.

GPS fixes with accuracy over 150m are discarded.

Because of GPS configuration, the track may not exactly superimpose over the features of the map, e.g. road intersections.

Depending on the timing of the readings, this may appear as “cutting the corner”.
Readings discarded due to bad accuracy may also cause similar issues.

Weather

The weather plugin takes your GPS location, geocodes it into a postal code, and sends it off to Google Weather, for the forecast.

You must have a Wifi network available; this does not use your phone’s data connection. Itis best if you have “preferred” networks configured into your phone.

Every two hours, for a three minute window, the Wifi network is attached (and reconnected if necessary), and if successful, the weather is obtained. At the end of the time window, the Wifi network is released.

A notification is sent to the phone’s status bar. Selecting the notification displays the Roundabout Weather Forecast screen.

This works even when your phone is in “standby” mode, and does not require the Workspace to be running.