Introducing Donde February 6, 2012

Donde is a GPS app for people who walk, for Samsung Wave S8500, Wave II, and Wave 3 mobile phones & compatible bada handsets.  DondeWQ is the same GPS app, but for Samsung Wave 525, 533, 575 and 723 models, the WQ models of the Wave.

Donde has rich online connectivity, but with a main direction screen that operates off-line, without needing an internet connection.

Donde

Are you a tourist? Donde can show you photos of sights near you. Select a photo and Donde can guide you there.

Are you a hiker? Donde can show you maps of the terrain, and lookup altitudes of waypoints.

Do you geocache? Donde lets you set GPS coordinates of caches directly from the geocache website.

Feeling weary? Donde can show you hotels nearby and book them.

Want to backtrack? Donde can navigate back to the GPS tag in photos taken along the route.

Orienteering? Donde can navigate fixed routes, and keep you on course.

Metric or US units. User friendly operation, for hiking, off-road navigating, wilderness treking, walking, hunting, geocaching, orienteering, cyclists, mountain biking, or tourist sightseeing.

DondeWQ

DondeWQ (formerly called DondeLite) can do most of the above too, it works on handsets that don’t have a magnetic compass.  All direction information is calculated from the changing GPS signals. As you walk, your position changes, and DondeWQ calculates your direction from that.

Also DondeWQ doesn’t have the ‘book a hotel here’ feature of Donde, and some other features work slightly differently.

DondeWQ supports landscape mode for the Wave 533’s landscape hardware keyboard too.

Those models of the handsets have a lower resolution screen, so the graphics are optimized to be clear at that lower resolution.

Donde & DondeWQ are also available in:

Français

Nederlands

한국어

Русский

中文 (简体)

正體中文 (繁體)

ไทย

Deutsch

Español

Donde Video Walkthroughs April 24, 2011

 

DondeWQ Video Walkthrough April 24, 2011

Donde Basics April 23, 2011

The first screen you see is the Direction screen. This is the main navigation hub for Donde.

Compass Direction Waypoints

1. GPS Latitude and Longitude.
2. The GPS Course. When you have a GPS position, the center of the dial will show a blue compass, which colour-matches the blue GPS location in (1). The Course is the direction you are moving. As the GPS location changes, the Course is calculated from the changing position.
3. Magnetic compass direction (not DondeWQ). The phone contains a compass, and the red/black outer dial and red Magnetic (3)  show where the phone is currently pointing based on that compass.
4. You waypoints, these are the places you want to visit. The series of targets to head towards. It’s a sliding list, slide it up for more waypoints.
5. Notice the coloured bar down the left of the selected waypoint, and the same colour on the compass? To head to that waypoint follow the coloured bar, as you come close the bar becomes wider as the waypoint gets close.
6. The three dots pull up the menu on Samsung Wave phones. Tap here to get the menu.
7. (Not DondeWQ version). This speaker appears when you have a waypoint selected and a direction to head towards. It turns on Warbling Guidance.

Notice the coloured bar (5) matching the selected waypoints coloured bar, also marked with a (5). When you are far away this bar is narrow, and it widens the closer you get to the target. GPS is not perfect, it has a measurement error, the nearer you are the less the direction can be determined, and so the wider the coloured bar.

Nearly There, and Arrived States

Once your arrive at the GPS location, a pulsing circle shows you have arrived. GPS can’t get you any closer.

The same screen on DondeWQ looks like this:

If DondeWQ has a GPS signal but does not yet know the current course, then walking feet are shown, to prompt you to walk so it can calculate your course:

For DondeWQ, when you select a Waypoint, an arrow is shown, the arrowhead will grow larger the close you are to the target, with a pulsing circle when you arrive at your destination.

Arrow type in DondeWQ

Overview of Screens April 22, 2011

Donde is laid out in 4 main screens, to get around you slide the screen across with a touch-sweep gesture. To show you when you can slide, a blue highlight edge is shown, familiar to Samsung users.

The four screens are laid out in a time-line, the present is where you are now: your GPS location and azimuth. The future is where you’re heading: the maps to waypoints. The past is tracks: recordings of where you were.

1. The Location/Compass screen. This is where you are now, it works offline, and has the waypoints at the bottom. You start at this screen.
2. To the right is the maps screen, this shows maps of waypoints and locations you are navigating to.
3. To the left is the tracks screen, this lets you record where you have been.
4. If you select a track, the you can slide further left to the track map. This shows a map of the selected track, together with any waypoints associated with it.

Map Screen April 21, 2011

The maps screen is an online feature of Donde. You’ll need an Internet connection to access it. To get to the map screen sweep the screen to the left.

Sweep Screen for Map

1. Sweep the compass to one side, and the maps will slide into view.

Map Screen Controls

1. Your current GPS location is shown in black with an extra dot to indicate direction.
2. The green circle is the green waypoint. The purple line is the purple fixed heading from that waypoint.
3. Zoom in using this button, it zooms into the selected waypoint & GPS location automatically.
4. Zoom out.
5. Your waypoints panel.

Map Screen 2 April 20, 2011

When you zoom out, the map switches from street view to terrain view. Letter you see the hills and terrain around where you’re walking.

Terrain View on Map Screen

1. Press and hold the map to add a new waypoint. A menu appears , tap this and you are taken to the add waypoint screen.
2. These dancing red circles indicate a location you are interested in.
3. Select a waypoint down here to move the map to that waypoint.
4. Double tap to zoom into a point on the map.
5. Drag 2 fingers across the map to slide the map across.
6. Pinch zoom with 2 fingers to zoom in an out, or use the zoom buttons on the phone (the volume buttons)

DondeWQ Map Screen

Map Screen 3 April 19, 2011

Street View Map

Zoom in and the street names, and other features, can be seen. The yellow circle (1) is the yellow waypoint (3), and point (2) is a point of interest.

You can see from the direction indicator, that our yellow waypoint, ‘Statue’ is 1.4kms east of our current position.

Adding a GPS Location April 18, 2011

Suppose you have a GPS fix and want to add your location as a waypoint to navigate back to, tap the menu and select add. Your current GPS location is entered for you, tap the add button it’s added under a default name. So adding your current location is a few simple taps. But there’s far more to this form.

Adding GPS Waypoints

1. You can enter a location here, lets suppose we want to visit Marseille as a tourist, we can type Marseille into this box, and a search button (2) appears.
2. Tap this search button and the name is located and the GPS coordinates shown in (4). This is the nearest Marseille to our current location.
3. When there is more than one match, these up and down buttons appear to let us select between the different Marseilles.
4. Latitude and Longitude are shown here. You can edit these directly and add waypoints by their GPS coordinates.
5. Tap this search and the altitude of the location is filled in from satellite terrain data.
6. Once we’re happy with the location tap Add and our waypoint is there.

• Enter latitude and longitude in many ways, Donde will fix up the display for you.
• Enter Longitude 12.12324 and it become 12.12324E
• -12.1234 becomes 12.1234W
• 12.1234- becomes 12.1234W
• 12:25:34- is becomes 12°24’34W
• 12.1234E

Map Button

The pin button switches to the map and shows the location as dancing red circles. If you want to see a location without adding it as a waypoint.

Add Item Screen April 17, 2011

There’s more to the add item screen than simply adding locations by GPS coordinates or by searching the name.

Add Waypoint Form

The tabs long the top offer several powerful ways to add waypoints.

1. The GPS tab, adds locations based on their GPS coordinates.
2. The course tab, lets you add fixed headings and do calculations, e.g. add a waypoint 1 km North West of a location.
3. The tab shown above, is the photo tab. These are your photos in the Samsung phone, and it lets you search for photos you took earlier by their location. The photos in the example above are photos from Marseille sorted by nearness to that church you see in the first picture.
4. The fourth tab is the web content tab. To use this you need an internet connection. It offers a wealth of internet data related to the GPS location.

The photo tab, shown above, lets you photograph key places as you walk, you can then navigate back to those places by searching the photos. To do this the GPS tagging feature needs to be enabled in your Samsung camera settings.

• Click add on the main compass menu.
• Your are taken to the GPS tab with your GPS location in it.
• Tap the camera tab, the photos in the camera are searched for images near that location.
• You can also enter different latitude longitude on the GPS tab and search for that.
• For this example, I entered ‘Marseille’ in the name field, tapped search to obtain the location for Marseille, then tapped the camera icon to pull up my photos of Marseille.

Photo Zoomed Up

• To add a photo as a waypoint, tap the small photo in the list.
• The photo zooms up to fill the screen.
• The GPS coordinates, distance from current location, direction and an estimate of how many minutes away it is, are shown.

1. Tap Add to add it as a waypoint, the waypoint will be shown with a check on it in the list.
2. Tap Back to return to the list.

Other People’s Tourist Photos April 16, 2011

The fourth tab on the add form is the web content screen. This is an embedded web browser, that lets you browse online content and add any geo-tagged locations it finds.

Let’s start with the Panoramio.com site. This site is a photo site that lets people share their photos with others and tag them with the location they were taken. In this example I’ve searched for Dolphin Bay in Thailand and it’s shown caves, temples and tourist sites that people have visited.

Tourist Photos from Panoramio.com

• First start at the GPS tab, and either use your current location, or enter/search for a GPS location in that tab.
• Tap the Globe icon, which is the web content tab.
• A menu offering a list of websites is shown. For this example, we are visiting the Panoramio website, tap Panoramio, and a search will be made to locate photos made by others near that location.
• This is a great way to explore new places.

1. Panoramio photos are shown in a grid as tiny thumbnails. To see a medium-sized version tap the photo to zoom it up.
2. Panoramio – Searches Panoramio for photos based on the GPS location.
3. Geocaching – Searches Geocaching.com based on the GPS location.
4. Wikipedia – First converts the GPS location to the nearest name using a reverse GPS search, then searches Wikipedia based on that name.
5. Google – Converts the GPS location to the name of the location then searches Google for that name. You can start searching for any content using the Google option. Any web pages you visit,Donde will search for a geotag, and if it finds one it can be added as a waypoint.
6. Hotels near the GPS location. If you are planning a holiday, use Panoramio to find the tourist sights, Wikipedia to find out about the place and Hotels to book a cheap hotel nearby!

Tourist Image of Thailand

There far more to the Panoramio feed than simply a location search. First tap a photograph in the Panoramio feed to get to the medium-sized photograph if one is available.

1. Here we have the Name of the Photograph, tap this link and you will visit the Panoramio page associated with the photo.
2. Here is the user that uploaded the photo. If you tap this link, you are taken to this Panoramio users page. This is a great way to see other geo-tagged photos from the same user. In this example, we know he visited Dolphin Bay at Sam Roi Yot Thailand, and you can explore what photos they took there, even add them as Waypoints.
3. To add the photo as a waypoint tap Add.
4. Back takes you back to the list of photos.

The same screen on DondeWQ is practically identical:

DondeWQ Tourist Photos Screen

Adding Geocache Locations April 15, 2011

The forth tab on the Add form also lets you directly go to Geocaching.com. If you’re not familiar with Geocaching, it’s a game of hide and seek. Items are hidden at GPS location, and you find them, exploring new places along the way. Sometimes multi-caches are made, where a puzzle is solved along the way to find the next cache.

Adding Geocaching Locations

1. Tap the globe to visit the web content (this part needs an internet connection, once you have the location to visit, you can navigate on compass and GPS alone without an internet connection).
2. Tap Geocaching you will be taken to Geocaching.com website. You need to login or sign-up for an account to use this site. Geocaching will show a list of nearby caches, tap one you want to visit in the web page.
3. Here you see the page has a geo-tag on it, showing the location of cache. Donde recognises the first of these on any page and offers it as a waypoint along the bottom of the page.
4. Here the location of GC2ATW2, 500 metres south of my location is shown. I can tap Add to add this Geocache as a waypoint.

For multi-caches, add the later waypoints using the GPS tab as you solve each puzzle.

Record your Tracks April 14, 2011

The tracks screen records where you’ve been and provides statistics on your trip.

1. The tracks you record are shown at the top.
2. The selected track shows the detail, here the maximum speed, the average speed and the pace. The pace is the speed when you were moving, ignoring any stops.
3. The total accumulated ascent and descent.
4. The waypoints for the selected track are shown at the bottom, together with the start and end points.
5. Record button
6. Add a text waypoint
7. Pause recording
8. Stop recording
9. To add a photo waypoint, press the camera button. This only works when you have a GPS position and a ‘Start’ recorded.