Saturday 11 August 2012

British Hills - a small update

As Hill-bagging.co.uk has changed their map page I thought it was a good time to include OS Maps directly in to the app (you'll still need to be online to view them). Please let me know of any problems you have caused by this.


I know some of you will be awaiting a database update to version 12.1. At the moment I'm unsure which way to go with this, whether to include the Irish hills and whether to rejig the database to match changes that the www.hills-database.co.uk team have made to the structure of theirs.


Note as of this version I can no longer support Android 1.6. As only around 80 of you are still using this version I hope you understand that certain features are not available at this level which I'll need going forward. Your app will still continue to work as it always has, but will not receive further updates.

Saturday 18 February 2012

Nearby Hills fixes

Version 2.13 of British Hills is now released. This should fix the force close issues around the Nearby Hills option that many of you will have experienced.

These problems have been around since support for tablets was added and are to do with a situation where both the map and list elements are trying to use the database at the same time. While I've fixed the force closes it's still a bit of a hack which I need to re-write at some point in the future...

Saturday 4 February 2012

Quick Update

Version 2.12 of British Hills has been published to the market. Mostly this is just a small fix to image searching on Android 4.0 phones and tablets.

Many of you have asked for the image search to show less "silly results". Have you no sense of fun? ;)
I am reliant on the vagaries of Google image search for this feature, so I can't guarantee good results but I have made a small change which I believe will see an improvement. Previously only the hill name was searched on, which led to strange results especially if the name was a common word (e.g. Pillar). I am now adding on the region for the hill to the search (e.g. this will now be a search for "Pillar Lake District - Central & Western Fells"). This seems to return slightly better results.

I've also added an "About" page, accessible from the Main Menu (look for the ? symbol in the top right or by pressing the menu button). This give some info on the application and also provides a way for you donate to show your support for the application.

I must stress that  British Hills will remain free (as in beer) and without advertising. However if I had to guess I've probably spent about 150 hours developing and maintaining it so far, including making improvements and updates when new versions of Android are released. Anyway, if you feel like buying me a pint so I can forget all that (!) you can click on the Donate button either on this web page or in the About page of the application.

Best wishes,

Adam