Don't refresh background if location does not change

[skyfaller]

I love Satellite Eyes! But I only run it at startup and then immediately exit it because I find it very distracting when it occasionally "updates" the background, usually shifting the map a few millimeters to the side. Updating the map is completely unnecessary when I am sitting in a perfectly stationary location at e.g. my house for long periods of time.

I don't have a good understanding of how Apple's location services work, but could we: (1) add a user option to prevent the map from updating if the location only changes a little bit? In other words, if the location has not changed in any meaningful way (maybe I moved from my bedroom to my living room, or maybe I didn't move at all but OS X thinks I did), don't update the map. Perhaps we could have an option to set how much the location has to change before the map updates? (2) if that is technically impossible or difficult, could we modify how often Satellite Eyes checks if our location has changed after startup? I'm not sure if you ask OS X for the Location, or if Satellite Eyes updates the map when OS X tells us that the location has changed. Either way some way to make it update the map less often would be nice.

[tomtaylor]

It sounds like you're in an area with a few overlapping wifi signals, with different latitudes/longitudes set, and as signal fluctuates it's trilaterating different positions for your laptop.

CoreLocation is set not to fire a location update unless the user has moved more than 300m, but that's often inaccurate, and it does it anyway. I'd rather leave this to CoreLocation to handle, but I suppose we could write some code to do our own distance checks from the last location.

Doing a time based delay isn't ideal, because there are plenty of situations, such as being on a train, when you want SE to update as quickly as possible.

I'll leave this open, and if I, or someone else, finds the time to write some distance checking code, that should do the trick.

[mattmb]

Interesting. I think I'm seeing the same thing. But to me it's more distracting because the whole screen seems to flicker with the update (not just the background). Does anyone else see that?