Greetings to the sailors. I’ve had an application process that I’ve been working on for about 5 days. My goal was to improve the Pure Maps search engine, because everyone on SFOS knows that using Google Maps is, inevitably, a bit difficult for us. No matter how much I wanted to use Pure Maps, I couldn’t, because when I wanted to go somewhere, writing a restaurant, cafe, or any address in the search box was inevitably making things difficult for me. There were even times when I ended up going the wrong way. So lately I focused on this issue and found a solution. Now the Pure Maps app offers search options as good as Google Maps.
How does it work? My solution was this: now I open Google Maps, choose the place I want to go, press and hold on it and pin it, and then tap share. When I choose the Android app I made, called Coordinate-Transmitter, it automatically takes the coordinate from Google Maps directly, prepares the coordinate in a way Pure Maps can understand, and then completely automatically redirects it to Pure Maps and drops a point marker.
A video showing how it works : https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g9njEZmZJqQ
How do you install it?
I shared on GitHub the things you need to download, friends. After installing both of them and completing their full setup, it should work. But based on the tests I did over 3 days, sometimes the service can disable itself. The installation is complete, but sometimes the transmitter service stays paused at that moment. If you run into a problem like this, what you need to do is =
If Coordinate Transmitter receives the coordinate but Pure Maps does not open:
- Make sure the Sailfish RPM is actually installed
- Then run as defaultuser:
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable coordinate-transmitter-watcher.service
systemctl --user restart coordinate-transmitter-watcher.service
You can verify with:
systemctl --user status coordinate-transmitter-watcher.service --no-pager
If the service says “Unit coordinate-transmitter-watcher.service could not be found”, the RPM is not installed yet.
Install it first:
devel-su
rpm -Uvh --force /home/defaultuser/Downloads/Coordinate-Transmitter-sailfish-0.1.0-2.noarch.rpm
exit
The general errors you may run into can be these: generally, when Google Maps pins a coordinate, if the app says “coordinate not found,” this is usually because Pure Maps could not match it exactly. The solution is very simple: if you experience this while pinning a place, pin somewhere next to it, or if there is a road nearby, pin the roads near it. It will have found the coordinate.
There will be updates in the future to further improve errors and similar issues, so if you experience any problems, please report them.
See you later, sailors!