Updating the Android App
We are extremely glad to finally release a new major version of the Mapillary Android app. This release corresponds to the recent release of the iOS app.
We have gotten a lot of feedback over the last year, and finally we got around to completely rewrite big parts of the application. There are a few things that stand out as important so we want to mention them.
Performance
- Upload is now multi-threaded and will use most of the bandwidth available on your phone, resulting in much faster uploads.
- The camera part is now saving images not in the main thread, but in the background, resulting in a much more fluent user experience and hopefully less stress on the phone's resources.
- Big grids in the review sections have cached thumbnails of images, resulting in a better user experience with long sequences to review
- All feed, status and profile updates are now done in the background and not blocking the user interface.
Camera
- We have added a hot-button to get to the camera in a number of places
- The UI is cleaned up, and the main settings moved into a easy-to-access side drawer, and on to the full settings page.
- There is support for UI rotation for left-hand usage.
- We added a setting to lock the camera direction in forward mode, resulting in 100% correct camera angles when holding the camera forward while riding or walking. Try it out!
- We added auto-start of new sequences when a certain gap (default 300m) is detected in order to save the trouble of splitting them later in the web editor. Yay!
- There is now a low-resolution mode intended for mapping in remote areas, possibly uploading via cell connection.
- On older phones, even manual auto-focus is now supported as a means of taking pictures both in single and sequence mode, giving you better outcomes.
Review
- There is now deleting of whole sequences available
- Pictures can be reviewed in a tight grid while holding the phone in portrait mode, a big grid in landscape mode, and a flip-view in detail mode. Clicking will get you into the system image viewer for easy sharing and saving to some other storage location.
- Images are sorted newest-first or oldest-first, and uploaded in that chosen order, too.
Notifications and Profile
- You now can swipe to refresh your feed of notifications, where we will enable more and more features as we build it out.
- The profile is now listing your recent sequences and stats.
Expert mode
- We introduced a lot of new settings to switch off/on different modes of pausing, warnings and checks to cater for all the expert users out there.
Graphics and Layout
- Kamil did his best to bring all the graphics and layout to a professional state. Thank you!
- We now have changed to Material Design and will continue to work in that direction.
All in all, we think this is a worthy 1.0 release. If you encounter problems, please let us know immediately by contacting raising an issue so we can hunt down the remaining bugs - there are a lot of devices out there to support.
Happy mapping!
/peter
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