FAQ

How is Evermore better/different than Yelp and Google Maps?

Neither Yelp nor Google Maps:

1. allows you to do multiple types of searches.
2. allows you to do multiple simultaneous searches.
3. provides targets to center your searches on.
4. supports searches through your address book.
5. provides a list of results with color-coded arrows pointing towards each of the search results.

What are Contacts?

Contacts are addresses pulled from your device's address book and displayed on the map as home and work addresses.

Contacts get loaded the first time the app is run after installation. While this is happening, a progress bar is displayed in the lower left portion of the screen. Small messages indicating the start and end of the loading process will also appear briefly at the bottom of the screen.

After the initial load, your Contacts will be silently refreshed each time the app is started. Because this can take some time, but typically results in only small changes in the list of loaded Contacts, no progress bar is shown.

For a Contact to be loaded into Evermore:

1. It must be in your device's address book. 2. It must have a valid home and/or work postal address. 3. Google's geocoder server must be able to translate it to a latitude/longitude pair.

Evermore Won't Recognize a Valid Address

In some cases, an address may be valid yet Evermore won't recognize it. Evermore uses Google's geocoder and, for some reason, the geocoder doesn't always recognize valid addresses. The workaround for this is to change the address slightly -- e.g., increment the address by 1. Although that is less than ideal, it is often sufficient for the geocoder to recognize the address.

Why can't I get a bearing on the List screen?

Devices can generally obtain a location much more easily than a bearing. When location information is obtained by the device, it always contains a latitude and longitude (the location itself) and it may contain bearing information. In order to provide bearing information, the device has to determine if it is moving and, if so, in which direction. The implementation of this appears to vary greatly by manufacturer. In all cases, Android apps simply need to wait for the information to be provided. When displaying the List screen (where location and bearing are most relevant), Evermore attempts to keep you as informed as possible regarding the status of both location and bearing information via two mechanisms.

LEDs

At the top of the List screen are two leds -- one for location and one for bearing. By default, they are red, indicating that no current location/bearing information is available. They turn green when the information becomes available. Because bearing information is a subset of the overall location information, the location LED will always turn green before the bearing LED. Because bearing information can be difficult to obtain, you may find that the bearing LED remains red long after the location LED has turned green.

Dimming

Each row on the List screen has the distance to the href="terminology.html#Pin">Pin (search result) at the right end of the row, followed by an arrow pointing in the physical direction of the Pin. When a location or bearing signal is lost, the LED will immediately turn red. Evermore will continue to present the latest information available (distance and direction of each Pin). However, the distance text will slowly fade over time after the location LED has turned red, to indicate that the information is getting stale. Similarly, the colored arrows at the end of the rows will slowly fade after the bearing LED turns red.

Why do I see multiple Pins for a single search result?

If there are multiple Targets on the map with overlapping radii, then a search may have multiple Pins appear at the same location -- one for each of the radii. This is by design. You have the option of clearing a search -- with this approach, an appropriate number of Pins will still be present at each location.

What new features are in the works for Evermore?

Evermore is highly expandable. Because it is map-driven and search-agnostic, over time more and more services and features can be added. For instance:

1. Long tap on the map to produce a pop-up showing the current local time at that location as well as a short weather synopsis.
2. Save specific configurations of targets and searches so that you can plot out a trip and then call up that configuration later.

When I do a Yelp search Evermore doesn't find anything.

There are several reasons that an Evermore search may fail. In each case, it should give you a reasonable explanation of why the search failed, although sometimes the failure might still be perplexing. Here are some common causes.

1. Many Yelp searches actually do yield no results, in which case a short pop up window will tell you that nothing was found. Also, the small led for the search will be lit only if something is found.
2. Be sure that you have a Target on the map. Evermore will not do a search without a Target present.
3. Be sure that the Target is visible. If you are looking at a portion of the map which doesn't have any Targets displayed, you won't be able to see the results of the search.
4. If you have multiple Targets then you'll want to check each of them to see if results appeared there. The easiest way to do this is to expand the map to display all the Targets and re-run the search, if necessary. You may want to use the Map screen to do this (click on the Map radio button as the top of the screen) -- that gives you the most surface area for the map to be displayed.

Yelp search exceeds radius

Yelp searches sometimes return items that are outside of the specified radius. For example, you might specify a radius of two miles yet a search returns something that is four or five miles away. This is a quirk of Yelp -- Evermore simply displays whatever Yelp returns.

Can I filter Yelp searches by price?

Yelp searches (e.g., for restaurants) cannot be filtered by price (the Yelp API doesn't provide that capability).

Can I filter Yelp searches by rating?

When doing a Yelp search in Evermore, you can specify a rating as a filter. Although the Yelp API doesn't provide that capability directly, the returned results do include ratings, so if you specify a rating in Evermore it will first collect all results without specifying a rating, and then apply the rating filter itself and return only those results with the specified rating or higher.

This has one subtle side effect which may be unexpected. The final result set might have fewer results than the maximum allowed, even though there are valid results that aren't included.

This can happen when Evermore initially collects the maximum number of possible results without the ratings filter, then ends up with fewer than the maximum after applying the filter. When this happens, you will get a short pop up notice indicating that the maximum number was found initially, but the total result set returned was smaller due to the filtering.