Automatic turning, based on location

[danialbehzadi]

It would be great if the app could turn itself on in a duration after sunset of the users location and turn off in a duration before sunrise.

[raatmarien]

Good idea, this would be very convenient for the users.

I'll add it to the planned feature list and will probably look into it sometime in the future. However, if anyone else likes to implement it, pull requests are welcome.

[tastytea]

It would be even greater if the app could dim the screen gradually based on location, like redshift does.

[raatmarien]

It would be even greater if the app could dim the screen gradually based on location, like redshift does.

Do you mean that the filter should change gradually when transitioning from day to night?

[tastytea]

Yes, that way the eyes can slowly adapt.
From the manpage of redshift:

During twilight and early morning, the color temperature transitions smoothly from night to daytime temperature to allow your eyes to slowly adapt over a period of about an hour.

It would be great if red moon behaves in a similar way.

[raatmarien]

Yeah, that's a good idea. I will keep that in mind.

[twckr]

I would favour the gradually dimming as proposed by @tastytea.
Maybe this repository would be helpful: https://github.com/mikereedell/sunrisesunsetlib-java

[raatmarien]

I would favour the gradually dimming as proposed by @tastytea.

I agree, gradually dimming would be better.

Maybe this repository would be helpful: https://github.com/mikereedell/sunrisesunsetlib-java

That library looks great, nice find.

[techwebpd]

like twilight app, it would be great

[danialbehzadi]

Many users turn off automatic location service for security/privacy reasons. It would be nice if there were an option to select the location manually.

[raatmarien]

Many users turn off automatic location service for security/privacy reasons. It would be nice if there were an option to select the location manually.

I agree, however I'm not sure of an effective way to prompt the user for their location. Would letting them simply enter their coordinates suffice?

[danialbehzadi]

Letting users enter their coordinates does it, but I think there should be a library to automatically translate city names to coordinates somewhere. I'm really not familiar to android development, but I'm sure there are such libraries in many other languages. When users try to enter their city name, it would search the city name in database and suggests possible results while typing, and user selects the right city.

[Albirew]

You can let user choose between location or date and time based guess (less precise but privacy friendly)

[twckr]

To get coordinates for a city / region / address you could use:

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search/<querystring>?format=json

[raatmarien]

You can let user choose between location or date and time based guess (less precise but privacy friendly)

I don't think this will be precise enough to make a meaningful guess, since the timezone only tells me anything about the longitude, which doesn't correlate with the local sunrise and sunset times.

To get coordinates for a city / region / address you could use:

http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search/<querystring>?format=json

Thanks for the link, that would be a possibility. However I'm cautious on introducing more permissions, like internet access, to Red Moon unless it is absolutely necessary.

[smichel17]

OsmAnd does this by downloading some wikipedia data. They do it in their own download manager, which requires internet permission, but this app could just include a link to where you can download that information, then import the data from a file.

[danialbehzadi]

another workaround to prevent Internet access is to let users select their location by touch on a world map image, which returns the coordinats.

On ۴ آوریل ۲۰۱۶ ۹:۲۲:۳۲ (GMT+04:30), smichel17 notifications@github.com wrote:

OsmAnd does this by downloading
some wikipedia data. They do it in their own download manager, which
requires internet permission, but this app could just include a link to
where you can download that information, then import the data from a
file.

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You are receiving this because you authored the thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#5 (comment)

Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[raatmarien]

another workaround to prevent Internet access is to let users select their location by touch on a world map image, which returns the coordinats.

Yes, I agree that may be a good solution, since the location doesn't need to be very precise at all.

[smichel17]

another workaround to prevent Internet access is to let users select their location by touch on a world map image, which returns the coordinates

This is how Twilight does it. For me, it's actually annoying -- I always wish I could just select more precisely with the tap. However, it would be a great interface if there were a way to zoom in a little bit.

[smichel17]

Okay, here's a maybe controversial question: is it important that to be able to manually set your location?
Here's my logic; let me know if there's a hole or if you disagree with the principle.

Principle: The main advantage of automatically setting the timer based on location is that it requires almost no thought/effort put into configuration.

Therefore, if it takes more effort to manually set your location than it would to manually set the timer, there is no point of the feature and we should not offer it.

It doesn't take that much effort to manually set the timer. I know when I wake up each day, and I know approximately what time the sun goes down. Certainly less effort than downloading a bunch of location data from wikipedia. Probably less effort than manually entering your location (who knows their lattitude and longitude off hand?). Depending on the interface, it might even be easier than setting your location on a map -- Twilight's map was imprecise enough that I had to try several times before I got an accurate enough location.

By that reasoning, we shouldn't offer the ability to manually set your location, even if it was trivial to develop (I'm not really sure how hard it would be).

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There is one thing left out from the argument above: It also takes effort to keep the timer in sync with the sun as the days get shorter and longer*. Is there a way to get this without inputting your location?

I'm not sure. There might be. Is it possible to get a location based on the time of year and the sunrise/sunset times? If so, we could allow setting the default location based on the user-set times, and then Red Moon can update the timer based on that location. If that works, it seems like the easiest way, both from a user's point of view and effort to develop.

*Red Moon currently only updates the timer when it gets an update of the location, so if you never turn on location services, it won't actually keep the timer fully in sync with the sun. But we're talking about whether a feature is worth implementing, so what matters is whether it could, not whether it does.

[smichel17]

This was originally a larger issue, which makes reading through it fairly unfocused. So, I'm closing it and created #206 to track the remaining part (manual location).