AlpineQuest & OfflineMaps

One thing that I find particularly annoying about Android is that, unlike Windows Mobile 6, the app installers do not let you choose the target storage device for the installation. I got caught out by this in AQ and discovered a few bugs…

On my new Note 10.1, I installed AQ before receiving my microSD card. Obviously, with no choice, Android picked mnt\SdCard0 for the installation, which is fair enough. I was not worried about this as I had previously noted a setting in AQ for redefining the data path.

So, having installed a microSD into the Note, I set about copying the alpinequest folder from mnt/SdCard0 to mnt/extSdCard. I then opened AQ and reset the data path to mnt/extSdCard/alpinequest. After restarting AQ, I then imported my set of GPX landmarks, but was surprised to note that none of my custom icons were displaying, even though they were present in the mnt/extSdCard/alpinequest/icons folder.

I then removed the original mnt/SdCard0/alpinequest folder and restarted AQ. It reported an error at first (maybe significant?), but then appeared to start properly. However, my custom icons were still not being displayed, or listed in the landmark explorer.

My next step was to de-install AQ and reinstall it from Google Play. I was very surprised to find that it re-installed into mnt/extSdCard/alpinequest/alpinequest!!! So I de-installed AQ again, renamed my folder to mnt/extSdCard/xxx-alpinequest and re-installed. I have no idea where it installed on this occasion – I could not find a new alpinequest folder anywhere!

Finally I renamed my folder to mnt/extSdCard/xxx, de-installed and re-installed AQ. This time it installed correctly into mnt/extSdCard/alpinequest. Once I had copied in the stuff from the xxx folder, AQ correctly displayed my custom icons.

Some subtle bugs there which I will leave to you to figure out

One suggestion…

It would be helpful if the SD folder location setting invoked a folder picker, rather than relying on the user to work out the path syntax. I also think that it should move (or copy) all of the data across from the previous folder location automatically, including the map cache.

Hi again and thanks for your report.
It's actually very difficult to know what location to automatically choose for storing the data. Some devices only have an internal memory, some only have an SD card, and some other have both of them... Finding the real SD card it's very difficult, and all the names are changing with the versions of Android.
From the application, when asking Android for the 'external memory', the folder returned can be either on the SD card (if there is only an SD card) or is in the internal device memory.

This is why I have added a 'SD card path' setting to let the user override the default location.
If this setting is empty, the application tries to automatically retrieve the real SD card path, by searching known SD card paths from different manufacturers. If nothing is found, the default android 'external storage' is used.

Note however that this path must define the SD card path (or any other wanted path), but not the AlpineQuest folder. So in your case it should be defined as 'mnt/extSdCard/', and not ''mnt/extSdCard/alpinequest'. I guess that's why 'mnt/extSdCard/alpinequest/alpinequest' had been chosen...
Knowing that, I have always found it to be working fine. Even the custom icons should be ok since only the names are stored, not the full path. But I'll make a try.

Also, I keep your suggestions in mind (nice, but not so easy to add).
Best regards

The same thing happened when my Galaxy S3 received the AQ 1.4.4 update from Google Play (I actually initiated the update from Play mayself). AQ updated itself into mnt/extSdCard/alpinequest/alpinequest which was very odd considering that it had previously been running from mnt/extSdCard/alpinequest.

This time I successfully corrected it via the location path field, using mnt/extSdCard.

I'll let you know if the same thing happens on my other two AQ device installations...