Things aren’t updating very fast. Why?

Give it a minute. To avoid taxing resources like bandwidth, the battery, and online services, the application doesn’t update things immediately. If your phone is physically moving, and awake, and your device has a GPS that is getting a good signal, your blue blip on the Radar Screen should respond almost in real time. The street address shown for you should update more than once a minute, as should your hotness. Hotness and location for other People and Places update with a frequency depending on your Internet connection, how many people and places you have listed, and other factors. Every few seconds, the application updates something on some person or place, going round and round, checking in turn. So it can take a bit of time before your friend’s new location that they just reported on a service gets updated on your device. Also, if you just added many PEople or Places (like your whole Contacts list), it takes some time for everything to get initialized, updated and geocoded, and things run slowly for a while as addresses are turned into coordinates, pictures are copied into the database, and so on.

A Blip isn’t positioned correctly on the Radar. Why?

The most common reason for this is that their location isn’t specific. For example, if a Person reported their location as simply “New York”, their blip will be dropped onto the center of New York state, no matter where in New York they actually are. An External Service may have exact map coordinates, a street address, or it might just report a street, city or other general location. Even an exact street address may be off by a house or two, because “geocoding” of a street address to map coordinates is not exact. Most geocoders can locate the street and block for a given address, but the position of each building on that block is an estimate, as it only knows the building numbers for the corner of each block.

My location isn’t being reported to services like Twitter quickly, or at all. Why?

Make sure your user name and password is set correctly for these services in the Options Screen External Services section, and that the “Send My Location” switches are turned on. If those are set, your location should be sent within about a minute of launching Myallo HotList, and every five minutes or so thereafter, if it is still running, the device is awake, and your physical location has changed.

I turned onto Maple Street, but the screen still says I’m on Elm! Why?

Myallo HotList keeps your location both as numeric map coordinates and as a text address. It knows your map coordinates and if your device has a GPS, the coordinates are probably very accurate, and updated every few seconds. The blue blip on the Radar map shows your map coordinate location. But the text address that is displayed has to be obtained across the Internet through a geocoder service that translates these numeric coordinates into a street and town. So this information will lag behind your actual location, depending on Internet availability and other factors.

I added a Person or Place and a Blip didn’t appear on the Radar. Why?

The Person’s (non-work) address or Place’s (non-home) address may not be known. Or, map coordinates for the address haven’t been determined yet. If we have a text address like “14 Elm St. Anytown USA”, this has to be translated into map coordinates before a blip can be put on the Radar. This is done via a geocoding service via the Internet. So, placing of a blip may be delayed until an Internet connection is available and the service can be used.

The address for a Person or Place is a bunch of numbers. Why?

The location may be map coordinates – a latitude and longitude. If a location is reported this way, those numbers are shown. Myallo HotList does attempt to translate most such coordinates into a street address using a geocoding service on the Internet. This is a low priority task and it may take a while for the translation to take place, or there may be no street address for the location, or an Internet connection is not available.

A Person was added as a Place, or a Place as a Person. Why?

Check that person’s card in your Contacts and make sure the name is filled into the First and Last name fields and not the Organization field. Or, check the place’s card in your Contacts and make sure the place name is in the Organization field and not the FIrst or Last name. Myallo HotList considers a Contact to be for a Person if there is a First or Last name. It considers it to be a Place if there is an Organization name entered. Note a single Contact may be considered both a Person and Place and can be added to both screens.

The same Contact was added both as a Person and a Place. Why?

That Contact has both a First/Last name and an Organization entered. This is not uncommon. Such a Contact can be added to both People and Places. When added to People, the First/Last name and home address (or other non-work address) will be used. When added as a Place, the Organization and work (or other non-home) address will be used. When a Contact is added both as a Person and Place, those are considered two separate entities. For example, you could delete the Person and the Place would remain unaffected.

A Person or Place had an address in my Contacts, but it is not shown in the Person or Place list. Why?

When you add a contact as a Person, it looks for an address to use as the starting location for that Person. First it looks for an address labeled “home”. If it doesn’t find one, then it looks for any address that is NOT labeled “work”. When you add a contact as a Place, it first looks for a “work” address, and then any address that is not labeled “home”. Myallo HotList follows these rules so a workplace doesn’t inadvertently get a home address as its location and vice versa.

Some Person and Place names are orange. Why?

“Discovered” people and places have orange names to make them easier to identify. A discovered Person or Place is temporarily added by Myallo HotList when an External Service indicates it is nearby. Non-Discovered People and Places are those you added yourself. Their names are in black (except for your own name which is in blue) and they also have a “known” icon on the bottom line just to the left of the distance information.

When a Person or Place is marked as “Here”, how close is that?

It depends on accuracy. Assuming your location and theirs were perfectly accurate, “Here” means that the two are in the exact same place. But every location has an accuracy attached. If they overlap, they are said to be “Here”. You can see the accuracy of your own location on the Radar Screen (and in the built in Maps application, by the way). It is indicated by a shaded circle around your blue blip. Other location accuracies vary. If a person has merely reported they are in “Denver” or zip code “90210″ the accuracy is not very good, but if it is “14 Elm St. Denver” it is quite good, and if it is map coordinates it is probably almost exact.

A service on the Person or Place screen says “(touch to reattach)”. What does that mean?

The association between that Person or Place and that External Service is broken, and you should make the association again, the same way you originally did, by touching and picking the Contact, or reentering the user ID. This rare problem can happen in two circumstances. The first is when the Contacts list on your device is completely re-created (you may have restored the device, or replaced the Contacts on MobileMe, for example). This detaches all the links between all the People and Places and the Contacts, because the internal ID of each Contact on the device has changed. Second, an online service might have deleted a user, or the user may have changed their user ID for the service. What is the impact of the problem? If you update a Contact, the once-attached Person or Place won’t see the update. Or if a person updates their profile or location on the once-attached service, the Person won’t get the update. Touch and reattach the service and all will be back to normal.

“Show on Radar” is dimmed even though there is an address. Why?

In the Person and Place Screens, “Show on Radar” will only be enabled if there are map coordinates available for the Person or Place. While there may be a street address shown, it probably has not been translated into map coordinates yet. This happens via a geocoding service across the Internet. You can verify this is the condition because if there are no map coordinates, the usual distance and direction information is not shown. Usually, you can just wait and try later. Eventually the map coordinates will be obtained, assuming the text address has enough information in it and an Internet connection is available.

Your stupid app has a stupid bug. How do I report it?

You can visit http://myallo.com/issues which is the Leptonic Issues Tracker site. You can join, report a bug, make a request for a future feature, or suggest a question this page should answer, and track its progress through the system. Or, just send an EMail to hotlist@myallo.com if you don’t want that hassle.

I have to admit, Myallo HotList is a one man show right now. It’s hard to answer all EMail. But send some anyway! I read it all personally. -Michael O’Connor