POI66 app

 

POI66 android app

This POI66.com app allows you to send your current location to the POI66 website, allowing you to publish your location and draw a trail on a Google Map, visible to you and other selected people while you’re on your trip, holiday, hike, sailing tour, whatever… All locations end up in your album.

For people working in the field, for instance those who collect data or store certain locations, like campsites, windmills or any other landmarks, it has become extremely easy to add locations. Just type the name of the object and press the send button.

Tips for versions V1.21 and earlier

  • Upgrade ASAP!
  • If you don’t see your locations appearing on www.poi66.com then you probably haven’t created an account yet. Check your sent waypoints here on POI66.

Features

  • POI66 Android appSend your location to POI66.com, where a map with your route is displayed. POI66.com can export to TomTom POI format, GPX, KML and many other GPS tracking formats for further offline processing of your trip)
  • Send a message with the location to POI66
  • See your coordinates on screen
  • Automatically send every … minutes (configurable)
  • Don’t send if you didn’t move enough (configurable)
  • Automatically create a user account using only one automatic registration SMS with a free reply SMS
  • Create a POI66.com trip album
  • Switch between albums
  • Set online displayed user account name
  • Rename online albums
  • Set and read online password
  • Send through the internet or SMS (configurable)
  • See what the album is like using the built-in browser
  • See last sent location as text (e.g. “Amsterdam, the Netherlands”)
  • Show online album in mobile layout
  • Show album description in the title bar

Future extensions

  • Automatic auto-send your location when your course changed significantly
  • Log your trip as a GPX file (easy to convert)
  • See who else checked in on POI66 in your neighbourhood
  • See what Points Of Interest POI66 has in your neighbourhood

How does POI66.com work?

With the POI66 app you send an SMS to POI66.com’s mobile number (not charged extra) containing your coordinates. POI66.com is a non-profit and free of charge website that allows you to track you on your trips. You can also use the internet to send the message, which could be significantly cheaper.

Every trip is called an album. You can create as many as you want. Each album contains a series of waypoints, shown on a Google Map. This map you can include in your home page. Once you have an album (let’s say “paris-2012″) on POI66.com you can access it through a browser using http://paris-2012.poi66.com and there you will find your map and route.

Requirements

You need Android 2.1, a few 100 kbytes internal storage, 10 Mbyte RAM, and access to SMS. We send 1 text message per waypoint.

We kindly request these Android permissions during installation:

  • Send SMS message: for warning the user. No other messages are sent.
  • Receive SMS: this is only used for the registration SMS (no extra charge)
  • Internet: the help pages in the application are streamed from this website. This is also used for the extra commands to the website, such as getting help pages, setting up an album, getting POI66 configuration data, getting location data and getting other people’s locations around you. The extra commands are only used by your request and all data sent and received is kept to a minimum to save cost. No other internet pages are used. No information is sent to any other party.
  • GPS location: without this, nothing will work :-)

Known issues

  • V1.0   Works fine but has some issues after long usage
  • V1.01 On some phones, the POI66 phone number appears as a floating point. Workaround: Just type “+31 638157313″ there.
  • V1.02 Could still have the phone number issue.
  • V1.03 None
  • V1.11 Indicates “Fake message sent”: looks stupid, but is harmless. The message is really sent.
  • V1.20 Problems with interpreting the registration reply SMS. Switch albums may cause freezes in the user has no albums yet.
  • V1.21 Bad landscape behaviour. After updating from earlier versions you can’t register. Workaround: Go into Android->Settings->Applications->Manage Applications->POI66->Clear data. Then start the app and try again.
  • V1.22 Does not send yet from background. Could have issues with foreground/background
  • V1.23 None

Availability

The app is available through the Google Market app. Use the search engine and search for poi66 or app4buck.

Legal notice/EULA

End User License Agreement: By buying, or downloading or using this application the user(s) of the application declare to agree with the following statements:

  • This application is protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties.
  • App4Buck shall not be responsible for any damage caused by using the application.
  • App4Buck shall not be responsible for any damage caused by any malfunctioning of the application.
  • The application shall not be used for life-critical applications or any other critical situations.
  • By installing the app the user gives consent for the uploading of his actual position to POI66.com where that position is visible to others.

Release notes

V1.0 2011-06-14

  • Initial version

V1.01 2011-06-15

  • Fixed settings
  • Added sound
  • Cleared text after successful transmission
  • Fixed character counter
  • Better error handling

V1.02 2011-06-15

  • Fixed phone settings format

V1.03 2011-06-17

  • Added POI66.com account tips and disable button while waiting for GPS

V1.11 2011-07-06

  • Added auto-sending
  • Added icon in title bar
  • Added option to have sound on SMS sent

V1.20 2011-07-22

  • Automatic registration and account creation
  • Added support to send waypoints over the internet (no SMS needed)
  • Added support to rename albums, create albums, change password and change username

V1.21 2011-07-22

  • Fixed registration bug, part 1
  • Fixed “switch album” when no albums present

V1.22 2011-07-29

  • Fixed registration bug, part 2
  • Added support for landscape screen orientation
  • Less pop-ups while registering

V1.23 2011-08-01

  • Better foreground/background behaviour (sometimes you could have multiple POI66 screens stacked)
  • Also auto-sends when the app is in the background when another app runs in the foreground (e.g. when on the charger)
  • Can come to the foreground to fetch GPS and auto-send (better for battery when not charging)


3 Responses to POI66 app

  1. admin says:

    Whoooah. We had so many text messages coming in that we needed to scale up a bit. Look http://www.poi66.com/show_album.php?album=unknown&nr=1193970#p1193970 to see the first waypoints.

  2. POI66 says:

    We’d like to emphasize that the registering procedure took too much load on the SMS server. We’re testing a better method now. Please await an update of POI66 before registering!

  3. can’t find the android app POI66. I have a samasung galaxy S2
    Please help
    regards,
    Theo Lammerts

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