Feature idea: distance calculator

[Tec]

As a truck driver that gets listed on many available load boards depending on where the load takes me. I used Tap Forms to build a database of these boards to refer to to avoid bothering dispatch with a lot of requests. When I dug into the potential for distributing this board list to other drivers in this company, it occurred to me how beneficial it could be to have a field where the app calculates your GPS distance from each city center. This would make it easier for the driver to know if he’d need to reposition to another load board in an attempt to be rolling again.

I’m also working on a database of regular shipper database so a driver can tell if he’s potentially near a shipper that could have a load ready so he’d be in position as the closest available truck. This would be a way to “force” a load to be assigned to him and get him moving sooner.

The nice thing about these databases is that if drivers with this company want copies of them, they’d have to purchase the full app as my lists well exceed the trial app limits

[Roo]

Would a map view of data points with gps coordinates give sufficient information for this?
This is something I would like (and have had discussions with Brendan about).

[Tec]

The map view, if it were general US coverage map, would work although without it showing the mileage to the cities within a certain radius (my company uses a max radius of 300 miles around the truck to determine where to move a truck if a move is needed, for example) of the phone’s GPS, 99% of the driver’s I’ve met wouldn’t have a clue what the GPS coordinates meant.

[Ian Longley]

Tec, akin to Roo’s suggestion, if you are happy to calculate the mileage radius from the truck to a particular city centre outside of TapForms, you might like to have a look at the Measure Map app. There are 3 versions but either the Lite (6 pin limit) or Standard version should be all that you require.

The app can do more than you probably need to (e.g. calculate areas etc). But in your trucking context you would simply place a pin on the current GPS coordiante of your truck and move the cross-hair around the map to each city. As the cross-hair moves it shows the distance from your current location. Optonally you can then place a pin on the location of choice and the distance between the two locations will be plotted on the map which could then be saved and/or uploaded to Dropbox.

All the GPS position details are attached to the pin/s but the drivers do not need to look at them (by pressing the pin) unless they are realy interested.

[Author]

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