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Tracker Booster

Overview

Tracker Booster is a small utility to help Android sports tracker applications (e.g. EndoMondo) to get best possible GPS signal by keeping the GPS unit active in the background. Some phones e.g. Samsung Galaxy have problems while using EndoMondo most likely because of GPS going into power saving mode while excercising. This causes the GPS tracker to loose the fix time to time and you will find the end result incorrect (the kilometers or miles will be way off the actual).

Tracker Booster is compatible with Android 1.5 and newer.

Tracker Booster will use a bit more power while requesting GPS notifications as fast as GPS can deliver (once per second in Samsung Galaxy Spica). Don't use Tracker Booster if you don't have problems with your main sports tracking software.

EndoMondo without TrackerBooster:


EndoMondo while using TrackerBooster:


Version History

 Date Version Description
 21.4.2010 1.0 Initial version
 25.4.2010 1.1
  • Added "Send to Background" button.
  • Added "About" menu item to show version number and application name.
  • Set the application to work on portrait mode only. This was as quick fix to disable the behavior when rotating the device would restart the application. I'll fix this properly for the next version so that application will be able to work in landscape mode as well.
 20.12.2010 1.2When clear pressed in the notification bar, TB stays still in the notification bar.
 31.12.2010 1.6 Localized to Japanese, German, Chinese, Finnish, French, Spanish, Russian. Only English, Finnish and French verified somehow to be sensible translations. Google translator used to translate to other languages. Please send me email of you see some weird translations on other languages and I'll fix.


How to Use

The basic idea is to start Tracker Booster in the background just to receive continuous GPS coordinates and keep GPS active. Start Tracker Booster.

Tracker Booster starts in inactive (stopped) mode. Enable GPS from the system menus's and press "Start Booster"


Next Tracker Booster will start getting the fix from GPS. You might see the GPS icon flashing a while in the notification bar. 


Wait patiently until you will see the numeric values showing up in the "Tracking Length (meters)" field. This means you are getting the GPS fix. You might experience great numbers showing up even though you are just standing still. Let the number change stabilize a while, which means GPS is getting close to locating your position as detailed as possible.


(Optional) You can reset the tracking length value to zero once you see the value changing has stabilized (might change a bit, it doesn't matter that much).

Press Menu and choose "Reset counters":

Value gets zeroed out:


Now you are ready! Just press the "Home" button or "Send to Background" -button to leave Tracker Booster to run on background.Then start up your music player and your sports tracker (e.g. Endomondo). Tracker Booster will continue in the background. Use your main tracker normally and hopefully you will see the tracking precision improving.

You will see Tracker Booster icon in the notification bar:

Once you drag the bar open you will see the Tracker Booster status, and choosing the row will take you to the running Tracker Booster instance which you can stop, reset counters and exit once you've finished.