GPS Coord – Web Application

Mobile Application Description

• The GPS Coord mobile web application was created in order to serve as research and data collection tool.
• The GPS Coord application will retrieve the user’s device coordinates and sync that data with the user’s device account at Google Drive.
• In our experience, publicly available GPS mobile applications included advertisements and additional third-party data which was unwanted.

General Information

• Chrome Apps for Mobile (MCA) was the chosen framework for the application development.
  https://developer.chrome.com/apps/chrome_apps_on_mobile
• Chrome Apps for Mobile (MCA) is based on Apache Cordova
• With Chrome Apps, one can use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to create an experience comparable to native applications.
• Create, develop, debug and test application on the desktop and then publish to mobile.

Application Features

The GPS Coord application is quite simple; it has four main features.

1. The ‘Find My Coordinates’ button retrieves the user’s device GPS coordinates and writes the current coordinates including data and timestamp to a data.txt file on Google Drive.
2. The ‘Sync All Coords’ button executes a function that will write all saved coordinates on the chrome.storage.sync (similar to local storage) that is currently available on the device.
3. Clear Memory – will clear the chrome.storage.sync from the device.
4. Under Settings – GPS Tracker A feature that will continuously retrieve GPS coordinates of the user’s device (by default set to 30 seconds)
   a. Track GPS – enable/disable
   b. Tracker Interval – alter timeout between GPS coordinates retrieval.

####How to Find Syncable Data in Google Drive

1. Enter Google Drive
2. In the search input box type – ‘Chrome Syncable Filesystem’
3. Inside this folder a sub-folder will appear (name structure similar to hfejkdhobxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
4. You will find the syncable text files inside this folder

Required Repositories

In order to develop and debug the application, several resources are required:

1.Node.js version 0.10.0 (or higher) with npm 2. Java JDK 7 (or higher) 3. Android SDK version 4.4.2 (or higher) 4. Apache Ant

** [Additional information can be found at:] (https://developer.chrome.com/apps/chrome_apps_on_mobile)

How to Install the packaged app into Chrome as an Extension?

1. Open Chrome
2. Enter the Chrome menu Preferences
3. Click ‘Extensions’ on the left side
4. Select ‘Developer mode’ on the top right side
5. Select ‘Load unpacked extension’ to add new packaged apps
6. Select the parent directory for the packaged app.
7. Select “Launch” to launch application.

Screenshot - Chrome Preferences