Category Archives: Blog

Play Store and VATMOSS

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This a stripped-down version of the article in French.

Google decided to automatically add VAT to add sales within the EU as a result of the new European VAT rules for virtual goods sales.

Because FrogSparks is a very small company, I do not collect VAT on sales (I sell VAT-free), at least in France (it’s not clear yet whether this exemption extends to other EU sales). But because of this, I also can’t deduct the VAT I pay my suppliers. This means that Google is forcing me to pay VAT twice on the map licenses.

Consequently, I have to increase prices in the Play Store for EU countries (which mechanically increases Google’s cut, and the other set of taxes I have to pay, which are based on revenue, not income, but that’s another matter).

If you would like to keep purchasing maps at the “normal” VAT-free price, you can use our web site.

vatmoss

2.0.6

  • Fixed Google Earth
  • Removed Yahoo (the old Yahoo tiles are no longer available and the new service uses a protected HERE API)
  • Optimization and fixes for map tile display
  • Fixed inability to create offline OS25k-only maps
  • Fixes and optimizations for WMS maps
  • New option to hide automatic waypoints (pause and altimeter)
  • Added support for using voice search: “Ok Google, search for Paris using MyTrails” (English-only until Google starts to support other languages)

Using machine translation to help translate MyTrails

There’s nothing wrong in using the Machine Translation system built into Weblate as a base to help the process of translating each string.

You need to be aware of some issues introduced by the automatic translation system, in particular Google Translate:

  • it may interfere with punctuation, introducing extra spaces before commas or periods, which you’ll need to remove
  • it may interfere with markup:
    • markup such as <i>italic</i> may be tuned into &lt; and other messes; it’s not dangerous but will look very odd to end-users
    • placeholders such as %1$s, %s or %d are replaced with strings generated by the application, and if they are messed up during translation, the application will not only look odd, it may crash (but only in your language, making identification more difficult), please take extra care to make sure no spaces are introduced in these placeholders and that they are not otherwise modified
  • when the source string contains line-breaks (indicated by greyed-out ↵ icons), the automatic translation may introduce non-greyed-out such icons in the translated string, which should be replaced with actual line breaks
  • another source of minor issues is the introduction of double spaces or spaces before or after the string, which I then need to clean up

I have also added support for Microsoft Translate, which may introduce fewer issues.

2.0.3

  • New track sharing community: RandoGPS (French focused)
  • Added option to search for location in OSM and IGN (French, requires online subscription)
  • Easy way to retry failed purchases (in Preferences > About > Retry purchase)
  • Bug fixes

2.0.1-2.0.2

  • Android Wear support!
  • Android L adjustments
  • Bug fixes (in particular, problem in Preferences on Gingerbread)
  • More options for flexible URL map definitions

Note: 2.0.1 was only published to the beta channel.

2.0.0

After over a year of development, MyTrails 2 is finally ready for general release. There are a lot more changes than can be documented in the normal style of release notes, and most areas of MyTrails have been upgraded or are completely new.

Updated look

From the transparent action and status bars, to the slide-out navigation menu, to the new track manager, MyTrails uses the latest in Android interface elements.

The slide-out navigation menu: quick access to all features

The slide-out navigation menu: quick access to all features

Transparent status, action and nav bars blend seamlessly into the map

Transparent status, action and nav bars blend seamlessly into the map

Stats

MyTrails is now able to display in real-time more than 40 stats about your saved tracks and the current recording. From much-requested stats like cumulative climb to obscure ones like average slope during a descent, you can quantify many aspects of your tracks. And these stats can be displayed for multiple recordings in parallel.

You can select any of these stats (up to 5) to display in the HUD on the main map view.

Create your own dashboard

Create your own dashboard

Over 40 available metrics

Over 40 available metrics

Graphs

While stats provide a synthetic view of many variables, graphs give you a better view of how these variables evolve over time. And again, you can compare saved tracks against your current recording.

Select the tracks and axes freely

Select the tracks and axes freely

Track manager

The new track manager makes it easier to visualize your tracks without necessarily activating them: view general information, stats and graphs, and even the shape of the track, or multiple selected tracks.

Download, share, upload multiple tracks at once, and much more!

Organize your tracks, upload, download, etc.

Organize your tracks, upload, download, etc.

A 4-pane view of the track's graph, stats, properties and map

A 4-pane view of the track’s graph, stats, properties and map

Altimeter

MyTrails can now use your device’s pressure sensor, which can be much more accurate than the altitude provided by the GPS. For the most accurate results, you can calibrate it manually, or just let MyTrails auto-calibrate.

Manual or automatic calibration

Manual or automatic calibration

Minimum version

Since one of the principles of MyTrails has been to provide good performance even on basic hardware, I have supported old versions of Android for a lot longer than I should have. MyTrails 2 only supports Android 2.3 and later.

I will continue to update MyTrails 1.4 occasionally for bug-fixes and map compatibility, but all new features will only be available in MyTrails 2.

Gallery


MyTrails 2 is finally in beta

MyTrails 2 has been available as a preview alpha since April, but feature creep and ongoing support and enhancements for MyTrails 1 have delayed the launch of the new shiny version.

But now, it should be available to the roughly one thousand beta testers, and I will fix the remaining bugs that will not doubt be uncovered. I hope to launch it for everyone in about a week.

HUD font popularity contest

HUD fonts

Before launch, I will trim the number of built-in fonts that MyTrails can use for the stats and HUD. To this end, I have gathered stats on the popularity of the possible HUD fonts (the first bar represents the default Android font). These stats only include users who bothered to change the font from the default (which is ‘digital’).

I’ll wait a bit more so that results start coming in from the beta, so if you feel strongly about one of the fonts, make sure you select it in MyTrails > Stats (and the eye icon).

Hud font popularity