Quality of Life Suggestions

Question

Quality of Life Suggestions

Pupstrr opened this issue 2 years ago · 2 comments

Answer 1 · 2023-01-08T18:32:20.000Z

thank you for taking the time to write your feedback. While all of your suggestions might seem small, they are actually not. There is a reason, why some of the features are implemented the way they are. I address all of your points below.

Controls

Add a toggle for metric and imperial

Small change, should be easily possible to implement.

Change controls to be customizable (keybinds in the app settings)

There is no need for this, since you can remap menu items via the macOS Settings app.

Make arrow key keybinds not a menu option (it flashes when holding down)

I tried that and it was this way up to version 0.1.3 I think. There are a couple of problems when not using menu items. Behaviours, such as ignoring the keybindings, when inside a textfield or when the settings window is in front or when you actually want to move the map etc. need to be implemented manually. It is a lot of work to get every corner case right. If you just use a menu item, you do not have these problems, since apple does all the work for you and you can actually remap the menu item inside settings. The flashing menu items seems like a small price to pay for the benefits.

Add WASD as an alternative for the arrow keys (can move and use trackpad at the same time more easily)

You should be able to remap the menu items in the settings app, but I might be able to also add this remapping to the app itself. I have to look into this.

Add a joystick in addition to the current auto walk button (and the ability to hide one or the other)

This could be done, but is a little bit of work. Whats the advantage of a joystick, that the current design does not have ?

Make the movement of the current location indicator a lot smoother (it's currently very laggy for me even over USB)

I would love to, but this is a hard limitation of the transfer speed / response time of the iPhone and Mac. I could provide an option to send updates more frequently, but this would allow the user to make the app crash / unresponsive, if the timer interval is too small. Thats why I choose an update interval value that works for all supported Macs and iPhone.

Interface

Add a right-click menu instead of the current hold left-click menu

I could, but why ? Is this more in alignment with the apple user interface guidelines ? If so, I'm more than willig to change it. But without any examples / evidence this sounds more like a personal preference.

Move the device/simulator selection to the menu bar

I don't now what you mean by that. Should I remove the sidebar completely ?

Move the search bar to the sidebar (like the stock maps app)

I thought about that, but moving the searchbar to the sidebar would imply, that you can search the connected devices. It would not imply, that you can search for a location. Moving the sidebar just makes things more confusing and not more consistent.

Add the ability to save coordinates or .gpx files as presets in the sidebar (and give them tags!)

There is a feature request for that and I'm still debating if this is outside the scope of the project or not. There are already a couple of apps, that allow you to generate GPX files and this should really not be the focus of LocationSimulator. It will most likely not happen, because I don't have the time to implement the feature. I'm developing the app in my free time and since I'm not a student any more, my time is really limited. If someone wants to implement this feature than I'm more than willing to consider merging it.

Add an overlay for speed rather than having it in the menubar

This could be done. Whats the advantage ?

Add the ability to type a speed into a field in addition to a slider

Fair point, I could add a menu item to set a fixed speed to not clutter the toolbar any further.

The transparency of the tool and sidebars should be based on the map underneath (This is a very very minor difference I noticed between this app and the stock maps app)

Not sure if you really mean the toolbar at the top of the window. If so, than apple is doing something strange in the maps app. I just tell macOS this is a sidebar, this is a toolbar. The styling is done by macOS itself. Or do you mean that the map is underneath the toolbar in maps, but not in LocationSimulator ?

Edit:
I now know what you mean. Indeed Apple is doing some weird stuff against its own design guidelines. My toolbar was already correctly implemented. I now updated the sidebar with some wild hacks to achieve the same effect apple has in the maps app. This only applies for macOS 11.0 and up. The behavior was in line with the maps app in 10.15 the way it was before.

Answer 2 · 2023-02-09T07:55:39.000Z

I created feature requests for all things I plan to implement. Since I got no response regarding my answer I close the issue.