I'm learning to work with GPSapp a little better now. The CES trip really put it through its paces, and I've got some things to report about how it fared.

I'm learning how to make MapsOnUs work better for me. First, I have to realize that sometimes it just gives the wrong street/highway name, yet the vector data is a correct route. So I learn to depend on the lines on the screen rather than the direction text. Second, I've discovered that the PHP script has no trouble parsing a route with a "intermediate destination" inserted in the middle, so you can use that feature to make MapsOnUs take a route that you know is better than the one it gave you by default. For instance, if MapsOnUs has you taking a small highway for a portion of the route that you know should be an interstate, plug in that interstate in that town as an intermediate address and it'll route you that way instead.

The app itself still has the same issues, the top two of which are:

- Occasionally locking up and/or disappearing from the Hijack menu.
- The keypress-fastforwards-the-song bug.

Don't remember if those are hijack bugs or GPSapp bugs. They are quite maddening when they happen.

Something that I realized on this trip was a usability/design issue with GPSapp, and I'm wondering how it could be solved. Here's what I'm talking about: Each time I make a stop at a gas station or a restaurant (each time the player is rebooted), I have to go through a complicated series of actions to get the map back. I have to:

- Select GPSapp from the Hijack menu.
- Wait for it to get data from the receiver (a few seconds).
- Load route.
- Scroll through the list of routes until I get the one I want.
- Select that route.
- Toggle to the map screen.
- Zoom out on the map screen a bit.
- Turn the knob until it "snaps" to the proper nearest waypoint.

That's a lot of stuff to have to do each time I stop on a long trip. Any ideas what can be done to simplify that? What if GPSapp could briefly mount /programs0 readwrite and update a configuration file? Not sure what a good time to do that would be. Perhaps after it has successfully loaded and precalculated a route. It could also auto-snap to the nearest waypoint after loading a route, thereby skipping that last step for me.

If I recall correctly, the startup screen is configurable in config.ini, and I've set the startup screen to be the sat-info-screen because I want to know how many sats are locked before I go to the map screen. But if it displayed the number of locked sats in the corner (perhaps sharing the space with the waypoint distances and the directional arrow), then I wouldn't need to start up on the sat info screen.

Is the starting zoom level configurable in config.ini? I don't remember.

Also, here's an interesting question: Can I program hijack so that a knob-press goes straight into GPSapp? That would really rock, being able to toggle back and forth between the player app and the GPSapp with the knob press.

Anyway, these are just ideas. I'm just trying to think of ways to make it cooler. It was very useful to me on this trip, considering I was able to get good directions from MapsOnUs this time.

Can I program hijack so that a knob-press goes straight into GPSapp?

I'm not a GPSapp user (yet) so I can't speak to much of what you've said, but I can say this one is definitely a "no."

The "snap to the nearest waypoint" was something I meant to look at after restarting in a rest area on MassPike and having it get very confused. Maybe later in the week I'll look. What I *should* do is drive somewhere and capture the GPS data, then use it repeatedly to test.

I'm due for ice cream. Maybe I should visit State College this week.