iOS 6.0 in Sydney? No suburb for you!

September 27, 2012, 4:08 am

Just discovered an interesting bug in the iOS CLGeocoder object.

At goCatch we use the reverse geocoder to get a good estimate of the passenger's pickup location, so having the passenger appear in the correct suburb is pretty important. When you get a response from the CLGeocoder you get the following fields:


@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *name; // eg. Apple Inc.
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *thoroughfare; // street address, eg. 1 Infinite Loop
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *subThoroughfare; // eg. 1
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *locality; // city, eg. Cupertino
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *subLocality; // neighborhood, common name, eg. Mission District
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *administrativeArea; // state, eg. CA
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *subAdministrativeArea; // county, eg. Santa Clara
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *postalCode; // zip code, eg. 95014
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *ISOcountryCode; // eg. US
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *country; // eg. United States
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *inlandWater; // eg. Lake Tahoe
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *ocean; // eg. Pacific Ocean

The two that I am particularly interested in this case is locality and subLocality. Because we want to show the most relevant neighborhood to the taxi driver, we prefer subLocality over locality. This has worked fine right up until iOS 6. Unfortunately with the iOS 6 release, the API has started returning the two values reversed. So for Ultimo (suburb or neighborhood) in Sydney (city), we get back:


[locality Ultimo]
[subLocality Sydney]
[administrativeArea New South Wales]

I checked the same results for the mission district in San Francisco] and it is working fine. I guess Apple would have noticed if that area was similarly broken:


[locality San Francisco]
[subLocality Mission]
[administrativeArea California]

With the iOS 6 release we stated getting a lot of taxi drivers complaining about jobs coming up in "Sydney" as opposed to a specific suburb. Ouch!!

We have added an iOS 6 specific hack which swaps the values until Apple gets around to fixing the issue.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,iPhone,iPad

48 hours of coding FTW! Literally

September 23, 2012, 10:13 pm

Last week Vodafone Australia held a 48 hour hackathon where developers team up with a charity to build an app to fix a pain point in their organisation. The winning charity receives a 30,000 prize decided by a panel of judges including Guy Kawasaki.

The dev team at goCatch decided to leverage our experience tracking taxis in realtime to help St John Ambulance with managing volunteer first aid workers in the field at events like New Years Eve in Sydney.

We built an app that we think will help save lives at these events and the judges agreed.

We won! Here are some photos from the 48 hours of lunacy.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,iPhone,iPad

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

September 15, 2012, 4:37 am

It's no wonder Tiffany dreads my visits. Even when silent, I seem to broadcast my prissy disapproval, comparing the woman she is with the woman she will never be, a sanitized version who struggles with real jars and leaves other people's teeth and frozen turkeys where she finds them.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Books,Review

Stasiland: Oh Wasn't it so Terrible - True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

August 22, 2012, 1:44 am

I like trains, I like their rhythm and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Books,Review

Halfway and not a moment to lose.

August 7, 2012, 9:15 am

Wish me joy! I have passed the halfway point in my epic project to map the events of the Aubreyad, the Napoleonic Age of Sail novels by Patrick O'Brian.

In a few months I will have been mapping the books for six years and, at my current rate of sail, I will be mapping for another eleven. I am thoroughly enjoying the process and even more so when I hear from other fans of the books. If you are one such, please get in touch on my guestbook.

Right now I have completed maps of the following books:

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Patrick O'Brian

[First Page] [Prev] Showing page 2 of 6 pages [Next] [Last Page]

iOS 6.0 in Sydney? No suburb for you!

48 hours of coding FTW! Literally

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Stasiland: Oh Wasn't it so Terrible - True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

Halfway and not a moment to lose.

Tags

Archive