For those people unsure...

of the current Traffic 4 England 'free' status. The application is in its 'trial' phase, where you get to use it for free if you want. By the end of the year this trial phase will terminate and Traffic4England will no longer be available for free on the Android Market place.

For those that are unclear, we didn't make Traffic4England free for a limited time to 'trick' people into downloading it. We made it available for free to gather user feedback about its usefulness, and for people to get an opportunity to see if it was the type of product that would be useful to them.

If people are confused by the time limited nature of the product, we suggest that they uninstall it and use one of the other traffic apps on the marketplace.

Location Location Location

The GPS function with Traffic4England is designed to provide an approximate location to base the traffic events.

Depending on when and where you use the GPS system, the accuracy will be anywhere between within 5 meters to within 5000 meters. Then android gets a GPS 'fix' it then attempts to do whats call reverse geocoding, which effectively calls the Google Map servers and ask them if they've an address for the current longitude/latitude position. Somethings there will be a full address, sometimes where won't, somethings it will be within 5 metres of where you are, sometimes it won't. The accuracy varies depending on where you are.

The GPS feature is there to provide a 'best effort' at placing your location so that the distance to the nearest traffic events realistic. Depending on the prevailing conditions, sometimes it will be accurate, sometimes it won't.

If you need to check, fire up the standard Google maps on Android and use the locate function. Tap the 'current location' marker to get it to show the accuracy in meters of the current GPS reading. This reading is effectively the best Traffic4England can do.

Traffic4England Release 1.04

Version 1.04 is primarily a release aimed at improving the stability and robustness of the TrafficRadio.

Now if you try and play the TrafficRadio while the phone can't access the SD Card, it will politely inform you of the fact. It's worth remembering that if you can access the SD card from your PC to copy files, then the SD card is in read-only mode from the phones point of view.

The TrafficRadio works by copying a sound stream from the internet, into a file on the SD card, then playing the file. If the SD card is read-only, this can't happen.

J.

Introductory Version

The free version of Traffic4England is our first venture into the world of Android. The basic idea is to make the application available so that people can use it and tell us what they think. The feedback we get will determine what form the application takes going forward.
J.

Whats in the pipeline for 1.04?

We're putting together version 1.04 at present. This will include an improved Radio implementation. Special thanks to Tim for helping identify the issues and beta testing for us.

The current version 1.03 and previous Radio versions have issues with SD Card removal and insertion. In order for the radio to work, it must be able to write incoming data to the SD card, then the Android media player picks up the data and starts playing the stream.

Trouble is, when the user connects the phone to their PC and copies data across, the SD card switches to READ-ONLY from the TrafficRadio program's point of view. The result being that it can't write the incoming data to the SD card and so the radio failed.

These issues have been addressed in version 1.04.

J.

System Downtime 22 Sept 09 - 8:00pm to 1:00am

The system well be down this evening Tuesday 22 Sept 2009 between 8:00pm and 1:00am due to Highways Agency planned maintenance. We hope to have the system running again once the Highways Agency have completed their work.

Radio Beta 1.04

We're working on a new TrafficRadio implementation, if you're interested in Beta testing it, please email support@aquarius-solutions.net.

J.

Traffic4England release 1.03

The releases fixes a force stop error on startup with Android 1.6, and is specifically targeted at Cyanogen users. Android 1.5 continues to work normally.

Radio Spool Directory

If you experience issues with the Radio not working, check that your SD card/storage isn't full. There's a directory off the root called 'trafficRadio' which the radio uses to store incoming streams. You can safely delete the contents of this directory if you need extra space.

Also there are currently issues with the Radio when the network connection is lost, both at startup and during a broadcast. Please let us know if you're experiencing these issues. Either post a comment here or email support@aquarius-solutions.net.

Advance to GO

Using Traffic4England today and the following display caught my eye.

What's happening here is there's a bunch of 'Go' signs with most of them referring to the same location. Kind of strange, but on closer examination it appears that the underlying XML from the Highways Agency contains errors (which is actually quite unusual).  In order to determine the item and event category,  Traffic4England examines the textual content of the various fields from the Highways Agency RSS feeds and attempts to determine the type of traffic event. In this case the XML content contains conflicting information, the item title says 'Road now Clear' while the underlying description says 'future roadworks on these dates'. Problem is which is it? In this case I've 3 options, assume clear, assume future roadworks or discard the entry. Given that this is and information system, discarding isn't really an option. Better to retain as much of the underlying data as possible and provide it to the user so they can decide what's happening.... which is why it looks like it does.

J.

Traffic4England Release 1.02

This release addresses a few minor issues with the GPS operation of the program. The program should now exhibit the following behaviour:-

• When GPS is switched on, an Icon will appear on the program title bar.
• GPS updates are requested every 3 minutes, if you've moved more than 2km.
• GPS should only function when the app is visible in the foreground.

If you experience different behaviour you can switch off GPS from within the app, and email support@aquarius-solutions.net. We want to Know! The Actual GPS operation of the program attempts to get a fix about every 3 minutes when the in the foreground. If a fix is retrieved, then the app will attempt to reverse geocode the position, and display the result on the title bar. You will see one of three things on the title bar:-

1. The geocoded location
   
2. The latitude/longitude when reverse geocoding has decided not to give a location (poor 3G signal for example)
   
3. The manual address as a result of the forward geocoding of the manual input location

We only display the first line of the geocoding result, so you may see things like "26-38 moor lane" on the title bar.

Note: If you're not in the UK, GPS will not activate ... saves you wasting your battery :-)

Please send feedback to support@aquarius-solutions.net if you experience problems. For the technically minded a stacktrace normally results in a quick fix :-)

Note: early donut users may experience a force close on startup. This will be addressed when I get my 1.6 build environment setup :-)

Thanks.

 J.

Initial Traffic4England Release 1.01 out

Finally got round to uploading the app to Google Marketplace. The main thing was to get it out and guage peoples' reactions over time. Also monitoring system performance/load and looking for new features and enhancements to add.

If you'd like extra features, improvements, bug fixes or just want to leave a comment, feel free below.