SMASH 1.6.1 is out geo-tiffs and -fences

Today we released SMASH 1.6.1 to the stores.

The main reason we are doing this is because there was a startup bug that was freezing SMASH, mostly on Xiaomi devices. If you experienced something like this: https://github.com/moovida/smash/issues/81

...well, update and it will be gone. 

 

That said, we also have some significant additions:

Geotiff support

Up to now we had tiff support needing world files and projection file to be present. Now geotiff tag reading is supported, so "real" geotiffs can be read. This is quite handy, since the image file gets back to be a single one again. Same as for other imagery types it supports overall transparency and single color removal, which allows for some nice technical map overlays (for example):

Geo-fences

Since were we live the COVID lockdown imposed people to only walk a certain distance from home, we decided to lend a helping hand. You now can add fences and make them ring when you enter or exit the radius. 

 The fence option is available from the bottom toolbar:

Once you hit it, it inserts a new fence in the current map center:

Defining the fence with no sound will result in a grey colored fence to show that it is "inactive":

To modify an existing fence, just place the map center inside its circle and then long tap the fence button. The fence dialog will appear again, this time with an additional possibility to remove the fence.

Now that the fence is active (on enter and exit sound set), the color is red and there are two borders. The green one reminds that on entering there will be a sound, and the blue one that on exit there will be a sound.

 

 

Just so you know, fences are not saved into the project, but only in the application preferences. This means that on uninstall or app cache removal..  they will disappear.

Log lines themes

While this is possibly my favorite feature of this release, I have written about it in my last post here, so just check there for descriptions and images.

Other small features

Magnet icon for center on gps: if you are in automatic center on gps mode (double tap on gps icon), it will be visible through a small magnet:

Location permission at startup now allows to access the settings to activate directly background gps usage even when the app is not in use. 

Note sharing now also contains the complete OSM url (not sure how that could have been missing up to now):

Project browsing has been made more readable. Not sure how about you, but in my case I just create a new project and using the default proposed name, I simply add something meaningful at the end of it, after an underscore. This allows me to order my projects alphabetically also by timestamp. The problem is that when I want to load an older project, I find myself in this:

The smash_timestamp take the whole line and makes everything unreadable. So now you can activate the upper right filter and the timestamp will be removed from the name and added as additional info ( day and time if available):

I guess that is it for this release. Enjoy!

A better view on GPS logs in SMASH

It is a while now that I am collecting gps logs done by car and bike to get a better idea on how to "correct" a bit jumping points. This is how the Kalman filter was added to the GPS points pipeline as additional information of choice (not always you want the corrected information).

As usual, when working on stuff, you need to get a better view over things, which usually means also to get a qualitative idea of what is going on. This is how we got to gradient coloring of the gps lines.

The result is actually quite cool and gives a good insight of what happened and when. So we decided that this will enter the next release of SMASH.

How does it work?

The GPS log properties panel now has an additional combobox that permits the selection of a color palette for a particular information.

If a palette is selected it overrides the solid color of the log, applying the palette to the line.

The result in the case of elevation is something like:

Which gives a pretty good idea about where the peak is. Also, assuming the temporal direction of the log, the downhill parts of the log are drawn with dotted border.

You might want to know where the steep parts are, right? That is what slope can help you in:

A maybe less interesting vision is the one colored by speed:

And last but not least, it is possible to view the log by its accuracy. This can be quite interesting for surveyors, if they decide to pair to the survey a complete log, which will then tell them where accuracy was better. Obviously in the below map it is simple to see where the galleries are:

I find this view of the GPS logs quite intriguing. Some might say that it would be better to have this information before a trip... and they are right. Which is why we added this coloring option also to gpx data layers. If the gpx contain the elevation information, then the elevation and slope palette are available:

I hope you'll also enjoy it... in the next release :-)