How To

How does it work?

Location Of uses a cellphone's GPS and Google Maps. It consists of two parts, the website at locationof.com and the software on your mobile phone called My World. As long a person leaves the application running on his or her phone, the app will submit the live location of the phone to the website, enabling others to watch. As soon as the application is closed, no more updates will come in.

What do I need?

To use Location Of to submit your own position to the system, you will need a cell phone with an internet connection (ex. 3G or Wifi). Also, you will need a GPS receiver, either separately or built into your phone.
If you want to watch someone elses whereabouts, you will only need their username (and their permission, if they have enabled private mode), and a supported browser installed on your computer.

This page anwers the following subjects in sequential order:

• Getting started
• The application
• The app explained
• Offline Mode: GPS Tracking outside of network reach (On holidays and abroad)
• Flags: What are they and how to use them
• Customize your marker, add an avatar
• Best Practice: Create good, pretty and functional tracks
• Phone Settings
• Achieving Accuracy

Whenever you are on holiday or anywhere the mobile network is not available, you can still use the tracker to collect data in order to submit your routes later. For example, you may go on holiday where roaming costs are very high, therefore, you can start the app in Offline Mode, and save your whole day's routes to the phone's internal memory. Then, whenever you are back in reach of network, or wifi at a hotel, you can restart the application in Online Mode to submit your historic data. This way you can show people at home what you've been doing, or what progress you have made.
Note that you must restart the app in Online Mode to submit saved data; You can not access stored information on the device directly or export it any other way (due to technical design).

Flags are ment to put a small piece of text on your map. Useful whenever friends are watching your map in real time, so you can send them status updates, or for your own reference afterwards.
Here's a proper example:

GPS does not work well inside of buildings, or in general, whenever the device doesn't have a clear view of the sky above. This will result in inaccurate data being collected and submitted, causing a huge amount of scribbly lines around your current location. There's not much sense in running a GPS tracker whenever you are not moving. Therefore, whenever you reach your destination, just exit the application, and start it again when you are going out. This will increase your over-all track quality and will, above all, save you data traffic and battery power.

This is when the tracker runs when not moving or when indoors. Pretty ugly, right?

Now this is a track worth watching. Long story short; Start the app when going out, exit going in.

You might wonder why the app doesnt simply detect whether you are moving or not, and start/stop itself. The answer is plain and simple. It would require power. To detect whether you are moving, the GPS would need to stay active non stop, thus using power. On top of that, the phone would also have to calculate whether the latest location indicates movement compared to older ones. Both these processes would consume valuable battery power. To keep the application as efficient as possible these checks will not be performed, leaving you in charge of what the app is doing in order to keep the battery lifespan as great as possible.

If your phone has internal GPS, make sure to enable all positioning methods except for bluetooth, as you will not be using that. For new phone models, also ensure to set the power consumption of the application to High and Enforce High Accuracy enabled from within the GPS settings in the application itself. This will not work on older phone models.

On the phone, go to:
Control Panel -> Settings -> General -> Positioning -> Positioning Methods
For phones with internal GPS, make sure all methods are selected except for Bluetooth. On phones without internal GPS, enable Bluetooth, WiFi/Network and Network Based only.

Also:
Control Panel -> Settings -> General -> Positioning -> Positioning Server
Make sure ' supl.nokia.com ' is filled in, and make sure 'Default Network Connection' is set to your default internet access point. Make sure 'Allow When Roaming' is set to 'Yes'.

First of all, accuracy strongly depends on the phone model. Some devices will perform better than others depending on the GPS chipset inside and the size of the device (which will act as antenna). Secondly, it depends on the chance you give the phone to find satellites and receive their signals. The more satellites a phone can 'see' (in direct line-of-sight) the better it can pinpoint your actual location. To get this working well, the device may need some time in the outside air to 'observe' the sky. Note the application will not perform any 'magic'; It will just submit the locations calculated by the phone. If the phone's calculation/reception is imperfect, the eventual results will be just as inaccurate as well.

Here's some advice for particular situations:

Cars
Best Location On the dashboard right under the windshield (front-window).
Best Startup 30 seconds before entering the car in open air.

Busses
Best Location On the dashboard right under the windshield (front-window), or, as a passenger, close to the left or right side windows of the bus.
Best Startup 30 seconds before entering the bus in open air.

Trains and Airplanes
Best Location In the left or right window of the vehicle. On (large) planes, any row in front of the wings (far from the jet-engines).
Best Startup Far prior to boarding the vehicle. Chances of the device detecting new satellites on board are minimal, though it will keep track of those found before boarding. For airplanes, start the application in Offline Mode and make sure to switch the entire phone to Flight Mode before taking off. Submit your tracks by restarting the app in Online Mode once landed.

Bikes, bicycles, walkers, skiers (Any outdoor sports)
Best Location Utmost outer layer of your clothing.
Best Startup Any way will do as long as the device stays in outside air with view of the sky above.

Indoors, in buildings
Best Location None. Do not run the application inside a building or when not moving.
Best Startup None. Running a GPS tracker indoors is useless.