There are some limitations on the number and size of the maps that you can retrieve so I employed a very simple caching mechanism to ensure I didn’t annoy Google. This certainly helps speed things up when testing and also enabled me to identify a small issue I was having.

One of the things I wanted to happen was that the image on the phone would only change if the location of the phone had changed and the phone had a network connection of some type (wifi/edge etc). So far it works pretty well except when the phone uses SkyHook IP  which manages to be 100′s of kilometers out. Thankfully since my positioning database has the source of the positioning I can filter out those dodgy SkyHook IP results.

I also found that it was better to remove the text from the docked icons. Well, technically, I didn’t actually remove it I just made it transparent. The text for the other icons was made red so that it can be seen over the underlying map. It’s a simple process. By adding the following lines to the Info.plist of my Winterboard theme, I get the desired effect.

 
	<key>UndockedIconLabelStyle</key>
	<string>font-size: 13px; color: red</string>
 
	<key>DockedIconLabelStyle</key>
	<string>font-size: 13px; color: transparent</string>

Any of the Google maps styles can be used (roadmap, mobile, satellite etc) but I prefer the mobile one since it’s clearer and the number of bytes that need to be transmitted is less than half of that for the satellite image.

Next up we have a little script that starts on boot, checks to see if you have the gllin ipk ( gllin_1.0+r350-r0_fic-gta01.ipk ) in the root of your sd card. If it’s there it will automatically get installed for you – Very useful post-flash. The script will also replace the standard gllin script with the one from the tangogps site. Why? Well, because tangogps and gpsd are in the image too! Shortly, I’m hoping to provide a pre-downloaded series of tiles for download too. The good news is now you can have gps and a gps application ready for you immediately. Oh one last thing. If you create a directory on your sd card called local you can create bin and/or sbin directories and have applications run straight from there – all those little utils you need to install again after each flash now have a permanent home.

All of these are part of the image, you do not need to install anything extra, unless you want to

Update: The bluetooth keyboard script is much more wizzy now that I’ve added Zenity to the image and use that so you can now pick the keyboard you want to connect to from the list of devices. I’ve also added some notify calls so that you can see what is going on during the script.