Harry's GPS Suite Forum

Hi,

I'd like to get your opinion on notifications sent by LapTimer. Just to clarify, LapTimer does not support notifications so far. Notifications are the short messages dropping down from the top of the screen of your smartphone (both iOS and Android) giving you a short notification like "Turn left in 100 meters" sent by an navigation app, or a birthday notice sent by calendar etc.

I have several ideas about valuable information LapTimer could provide while it is not active. I list some of them below and would like you to vote which of these notifications would be interesting for you - and which ones are not. The event that made me think about that feature is the issue with Bluetooth connections introduced in iOS7.1 (and fixed in iOS7.1.2). It made BT connections to external GPS and OBD dongles nearly unusable. I would have loved to send a short message to all LapTimer users they should either not update currently - or try one of the known workarounds...

Advertisements - and other messages bugging you - will certainly never be sent, I want to add LapTimer value here!

In case you have ideas on additional events you want to be notified on, please just reply on this thread.

- Harry

Call me old fashioned, but all of those things appear to be better suited to an email distribution list. My phone gets bloated enough with every other app thinking it needs to run a service just to shove notifications in my face, I'd rather not add another one.

The problem is only Apple and Google know all LapTimer users (and their mail address). The number of users following the forum or Facebook are the minority (single digit percentage). So notifications are a mechanism to reach your users...

Harry

Kojiro wrote:Call me old fashioned, but all of those things appear to be better suited to an email distribution list. My phone gets bloated enough with every other app thinking it needs to run a service just to shove notifications in my face, I'd rather not add another one.

I would have been happy to know about the Bluetooth issue before upgrading to iOS 7.1.1 and almost throwing my iPhone and VBOX out the windows because it simply wouldn't work...
I'm not a fan of notifications either and only have a few activated. I would definetely activate the ones for HLT.

Being notified to not 'upgrade' to 7.1.1 would have been nice if the notification had been timely. The only problem I see is that bugs in the OS don't always show up the first day or two. It seems with Apple, upgrading promptly is a bad idea. In which case, you don't need a notice, you're probably already watching this forum and other places to see if there's a problem.

As the saying goes: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

A notification like that on iOS7.1 will not help everybody as it will always be late. But it may help a lot of users even when issued late: either they are warned to upgrade from iOS7.0 *or* they at least know there is an issue and work around the one or the other way. In this particular situation I really became desperate because I knew about the problem (and posted warnings) but have not been able to reach all users (or at least a big portion). Please keep in mind, the majority of LapTimer users are not registered on the forum or Facebook.

- Harry