Hello! I’ve been using PoLo on and off for about a year now, it’s very nice logging software. Whenever I’m doing POTA I either run HAMRS desktop if I know I’m going to be working a large pile up, or if I’m going lightweight I’ll use a pen and paper. I’m a slow writer and I’d really like it if PoLo could fully take the place of a pen and paper for me, but I strongly dislike using my phone during an activation where possible, and I often don’t have it with me at all. Not to mention that its battery would die sitting with the brightness all the way up and the screen on for a whole activation later in the day.
My solution would be to use PoLo on my pocket e-reader. I have a Boox Palma2 which runs a full copy of Android, but uses an e-ink screen (the same size as a smartphone). I nearly always have it with me to read, and it is very legible in direct sunlight. On top of that the device lasts a long time even powered on for extended periods (in a measure of weeks). The problem is not running PoLo on it, I’m very confident that PoLo would run fine. My concern is that due to this device’s Chinese origin I’ve never connected it to the internet and don’t intend to any time soon. This raises a problem because it means PoLo cannot refresh the database of parks or callsigns. It would be very useful for me if it was possible to drop the data onto my device over USB and just have PoLo import it. I know this is probably a big ask because most people aren’t in a situation like mine, but it would be excellent to have full offline capability on a program that is often used out in the field outside of cell coverage.
Hmm, I hate to say this but this is a very edge/unique use case.
I have a tablet which is not on 4/5G but does do wifi. It is not a premium model but the battery lasts +two days of operations with PoLo and can load up/down data when I am within wifi range but remain offline if I wish it to.
I think most operators are some where in this operating space. I have used my phone on rare occasions but like the bigger screen more.
How does the e-reader load books? Does it provide access to an external USB drive of something?
And of course you’d have to do without all the features associated with spots and spotting.
Alan
I just load files on through USB. When I plug it into my PC it mounts as an MTP device and I can access and modify the device’s entire filesystem. I just drop my books on through my file manager. I do understand that this is probably an edge case, but I thought it worthwhile to at least make a request in-case it’s not as complicated in practice as I imagine. I’m not personally familiar with how PoLo stores it’s data at all.
OK well atm resources are being directed at a desktop version of PoLo. The mobile version is pretty mature now. So if this were ever to come about, it may be quite a while off.
As far as storage is concerned, PoLo stores data in an sqlite database in qson format (similar to json). It obeys operating system restrictions on the "sandbox’/security model of restricting access to this data to the designated application creating/using it. So you’d probably need to do a lot tweaks re side loading, developer access etc to have access to the data from outside the application.
Alan
Additionally, to use the export data feature in PoLo which is the feature which actually generates the ADIF file you use for uploading, PoLo would need to be able to share the export function to something e.g. your USB drive. I’m not sure if the USB drive would be visible from within applications on the reader.
Alan
Just to clear things up, I’m not loading files through a USB drive, I plug the device into my computer through USB. I don’t expect that the export function to be an issue since it should be able to save directly to the device’s storage, right? That’s how I do it on my iPhone currently whenever I do use it on there.
I’m not an Android person in the slightest, I’ve been using iOS since probably ~2015. I still do understand Android development to an extent though, and can build my own copy. I’ll see what I can do personally since this sounds like it may not even be a considered feature. Perhaps I can make the app swap in a SQLite db from a static user accessible path. Thanks for the help.
out of interest, have you run Wireshark or similar when you connect the device to your PC? It might interesting to see if the device sends data somewhere when it finds an internet connection and it acquires your local account permissions.
Alan
That’s a good question. My reasons for not connecting it to the internet is just so it doesn’t have persistent access to my network, but mostly just so it doesn’t phone home with usage or location data. From what I’ve seen from others online it’s not an adversarial device, it’s just quite chatty with servers overseas which I don’t love. I did very briefly consider the MTP connection when I first purchased the device, but I never bothered to test because that would be a suspicious behaviour past standard data collection. I already have Wireshark installed though, so I did give it a test just now and I’m pleased to say that it revealed nothing at all. Just standard MDNS and ICMP traffic from my computer. I would be somewhat interested to see if it did anything different on Windows, but I don’t have a Windows machine and that’s not my use case so it’s not the biggest deal for me.
One big hurdle would be installing PoLo on the device.
I do not want to release standalone APK downloads of PoLo because it makes it really really hard to manage app updates, and with the app being updated several times a month, I don’t want to deal with users running older versions.
Adding support to load the data files from some local file storage is not impossible, but to be honest, it would be very low in the list of priorities.
No big deal, I just built a copy and loaded it on my device. I’ll set it to use replaceDatabase to swap in a pre-loaded db. Thanks for all the assistance .
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