Vehicle Tracking - GPS Units vs Smartphone Applications

As we know now a days vehicle tracking is being important for businesses and users.

All the businesses want to know 

• Where their vehicles are?
• How much they travelled?
• What route they have taken?
• Is it cost effective route?
• How they can reduce fuel expenses?

All the end users want to know

• When the item will be delivered?
• What is the current status and where it reached?
• How much more time will it take?

So most the business are looking for GPS based tracking system for their vehicles. Now it leads to a question that what is the effective tracking solution? 

A Standalone and embedded GPS unit or A Smartphone Application

This blog will clarify more on this and help you decide the best solution for you. 

First of all lets see what is Embedded GPS Unit.

GPS unit is device with it's own operating system, display and sender and receiver to track users. It can be in the small chip that can be installed in your vehicle and that can communicate with GPS satellite and your location to predefined receiver.

It can be simple device with display and some kind of configurable panel where user can interact with it and can change settings of it. In any case stand alone GPS units are specially designed devices with it's own chip sets and all. It has to be manufactured from scratch.

What is Smartphone Application

Now a days all smart phones like Android, iOS have capability of interacting with GPS satellites so based on this there are smart phone applications which can take advantage of GPS capability and can be used to track mobile locations. This smartphone application can be developed easily and can work with any type of servers and easy to maintain. Basically this application will work on background and will send location information for tracking.

Here are some vital comparisons on both approach. 

-->

	GPS Units	Smartphone Applications
Cost	High	No Cost to Moderate Cost
Accuracy	High	Moderate to High
Special Hardwares	Mandatory	Not required
Compatibility	No	Yes
Human Interference	Not Possible	Moderate
Maintenance	Required	Not Required

As you can see in above table GPS units are not cost effective as it needs special hardware and embedded system designs. However in case of mobile app your smartphone works as hardware. 

Accuracy is much higher in case of GPS units as it's built with spacial hardwares, while smart phone apps depends on phone hardware and in some devices it may not give accurate result.

Special hardware designs are required for GPS units which is not required in case of smart phone apps. Also GPS units designed with some hardware may not be compatible with other hardwares, which is not a case for smartphone apps. It works on almost all the platforms and all the devices.

Biggest advantage of stand alone GPS unit is almost no human interference, as this is the embedded systems so users can not hack or cheat with it. While smartphone apps can be hacked by user interface, For example, user can kill background services in phone or can switch off phone GPS etc. so user can not be tracked.

Employee Tracking Application for On Field Employees - Adsum Mobile GPS APP

Are you facing following situations in your business?

I have on field employees but don't know when and where they started work.
I don't know where my employees are.
I don't know how many hours they are working.
No way to check attendance.
Tired of fake traveling reports.

If you have ever faced one of the above situation in your business then we have a solution for you. 

The Adsum mobile app turns your employee's cell phone into tracking device so you can virtually 'ride along' when they are out in the field. You can track employee time, location at any point of time. This is a web based solution, so you don't have to install any software. You can access this data from anywhere using internet.

The Adsum mobile app has attendance management system with live tracking of employees. You can see when and where your remote staff starts working. You can see number of hours worked during a day. You can see live tracking of user.  At end of the month you have attendance report with working hours that can be used in any payroll system.

How it works?

Key Benefits And Features

1) Real time tracking of on field employee. View tracking on Map along with time and location information.

2) Get real time working hours and attendance report for each day and each month.

3) Real time notifications of attendance marking of employees.

4) Get custom reports like total KMs travelled for each employee.

5) Most accurate attendance and expense report.

Example of Tracking Report

Counter Measures For "Extra Smart Employees"

We know that in current edge of technology, people are smart now. So for those "Extra Smart Employees" we have added counter measures. They can switch off phone for not to be tracked or go offline of Switch Off GPS so that app can not get location. Well, in Adsum mobile app we are tracking all those activities and show you in report. 

In case they go offline, we have added offline storage of locations that will be synched later on to server so you will have all the tracking data.

In case they switch off the phone, we save that activity along with battery percentage so you will that in report. 

In case they switch off GPS, we save that activity and send it to server.

So get this solution for your business and increase your productivity and profit.

For further information, please contact.

Email : app@novustouch.com

Phone : Vibhay Vaidya : +919920465555 / Rinkal Shah : +919898171728

Add Google Place Auto Suggest to Sencha Touch

Hello,

Recently in one of my project we had a requirement to add Google Place Auto Suggest in Sencha Touch app and I faced certain issue in that so in this blog I am going to explain how to do this.

You can get more information about google place auto suggest from following link.

https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/autocomplete

When you implement it in any web app you will get following result.

As when you start typing it will give you suggestions and you can pick any one suggestion from it.

When we implement same thing with Sencha Touch text field it was working fine. When you start typing suggestions were working but the problem was when user tap to pick one of the suggestion it was not working. It just closes the suggestions and nothing is saved in textfield. There were some solutions like adding some classes and all. I tried everything but it was not working at all. So I came up with different solution. First of all add following textfield in your view.

{

xtype: 'panel',

flex:'1',

items:[

{

xtype: 'textfield',

placeHolder: 'TYPE IN THE CITY OR THE ADDRESS',

itemId: 'autoSuggest',

id: 'autoSuggest',

height: 10,

inputCls:'x-input-el x-form-field x-input-text grey-input',

name: 'address',

allowBlank: false,

autoCapitalize: false,

clearIcon: false

}

]

}

Now bind key up event for this textfield in your controller.

'#autoSuggest': {

keyup: 'onSearchAddressTap'

}

Now our logic is the query Google place API manually and store result in Data Store and show it in dataview. So we will need model and store.

Following is our model.

Ext.define('MYAPP.model.AddressSuggestion', {

    extend: 'Ext.data.Model',

    config: {

        fields: [

            { name: "description", type: 'string' }

        ]

    }

});

And Following is our store.

Ext.define('MYAPP.store.AddressSuggestion',{

    extend:'Ext.data.Store',

    config:{

        model: 'MYAPP.model.AddressSuggestion',

        autoLoad: true,

        proxy:{

            type: 'memory'

        }

    }

});

Now lets key up event.

onSearchAddressTap: function(textField){

Ext.getStore('AddressSuggestion').removeAll();

if(textField.getValue().length > 3){

this.getVenueAddress().show();

Ext.Ajax.request({

url : 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/autocomplete/json?input='+textField.getValue()+'&types=geocode&language=fr&key=YOURKEY',

scope : this,

//method to call when the request is successful

success:function(response,opts)

{

var result = Ext.decode(response.responseText);

for(var i =0;i

Ext.getStore('AddressSuggestion').add({'description':result.predictions[i].description});

}

console.log(result);

},

failure:function(err)

{

}

});

}

}

So as you can see above we are sending an Ajax request to google maps api and store result in Datastore. 

Now add following dataview in your view just below the above textfield.

{

xtype: 'panel',

flex: '1',

layout: 'fit',

items: [

{

xtype   : 'dataview',

margin: '0 20 0 20',

itemId: 'venueAddress',

id: 'venueAddress',

itemTpl:

[

'<table style="border-bottom: 1px solid #e3e3e3;"><tr><td style="padding-bottom: 12px;padding-top: 12px;width:95%"><div style="color:#262626;font-size: 15px">{description}</div></td><td><img width="40" height="40" src="resources/images/howMuchSpace.png" /></td></td></tr></table>'

],

store: 'AddressSuggestion'

}

]

}

So now as soon as you start typing you will get result filled up in dataview and then add itemtap event of dataview and get the selected address and hide the dataview.

onVenueAddressItemTap: function(list, index, target, record, e){

this.getAutoSuggest().setValue(record.get('description'));

this.getVenueAddress().hide();

}

Ultimate output is like following.

Hope this helps you.

Introducing Tagsum - GPS Location Tagging

Hello,

This blog is about my company's product. After we introduced following two products.

Adsum
Tracksum

Here is our next product Tagsum - GPS Location Tagging. This app is helpful in tagging the required location with exact latitude and longitude.

This app is helpful in tagging the required location with exact latitude and longitude of the desired location. Very useful app for field survey in remote locations. You don't need special GPS devices to locate locations now. If you have smart phone just install this app and use it. It uses standard GPS services so you get very accurate locations. Locations added with this app can be downloaded in excel files later from admin panel.

Also in admin panel you can create routes with tagged location and can plot path on Google map with standard markings.

Also you can preload your locations in app and tag it with latitude and longitude from the application. So you can update your locations or add new locations.  This application can be used in various domains and fields like.

Field Survey
Geological Survey
Map building.
City Paths Creation etc..

Major benefit of our app is that you will get admin panel where you can maintain your app users, you can add/update/delete users, can see tagged locations, can create add new locations for tagging, can create paths. When you create path it will also calculate total kms for the path. This gives you much more flexibility. Your data will be confidential and only you can see that in admin panel.

So if you need this app please install app from Google Play Store. App is available from following link.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tagsum.app&hl=en

And get back to us for admin panel access.

Android Application Get GPS ON/OFF Notification

Hello,

Recently in one of my project we had location service which is used send locations to server and draw a path on map of travel. As we know to get accurate location from the device we need GPS turned on and we wanted to track event and log event on server if user turn off GPS purposefully. In this blog I am going to explain how to do this.

First of all you need to add following permissions to your android manifest file so that your app can access users location.

 <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION" />

 <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" />

 <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_LOCATION_EXTRA_COMMANDS" />

Now create an instance of location manager which receives location updates from GPS. 

locationManager = (LocationManager) this.getSystemService(Context.LOCATION_SERVICE);

locationManager.requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER, 0, 0, this);

As you can see in above code we are creating location manager instance and set it to receive updates from GPS. Now we will add GPS status listener.

locationManager.addGpsStatusListener(new android.location.GpsStatus.Listener()

  {

    public void onGpsStatusChanged(int event)

    {

        switch(event)

        {

        case android.location.GpsStatus.GPS_EVENT_STARTED:

            Log.v("gps","gps is on");

            break;

        case android.location.GpsStatus.GPS_EVENT_STOPPED:

            Log.v("gps","gps is off");

            break;

        }

    }

});

As you can see in above code we have added GPS status listener to location manager. When either GPS is turned on or off onGpsStatusChanged event callback will be called and you can check case as shown in above code and do the stuff in there.

Hope this helps you.