Rob Savoye turned me on to Every Door, and it’s great but it’s also super frustrating. It has no documentation and is definitely not intuitive. Thus it’s probably a powerful tool but ordinary people like me can only access about 1% of its power.

Simple things like “move the map display to my current position” don’t even seem to be provided. It seems to jump me to the last place that my GPS was used by some other app – and then get stuck there and never move again. (My GPS is configured to NOT use cellphone sites nor wifi access points, because those methods report my location to a central server, so it often takes seconds or minutes to get an initial GPS fix.)

Zverik’s tutorial here (the first one I’ve seen, and the only one that seems to exist) seems to make the assumption that you will always be editing in some small area near to the last place you edited. So moving the map manually is easy. That assumption isn’t true for me. I map places that are 100 kilometers or more apart, often mapping in cities that I travel to on airplanes. I’m not going to scroll the map manually from Denver to Chicago. Instead, I just get frustrated and quit the app if I can’t get it to show me the shops that are right in front of me for editing. If there is some function for “go to current position”, please un-hide it from the interface, or document it. I even found a crosshair in a circle, hiding under the Tree icon, but it appears only if I scroll the map. Now that’s obscure.. But even then, pressing it doesn’t take me to my current GPS position anyway!

I can’t even figure out how to do the thing it was built to do – map every door. There’s a building near me with a service entrance. I have no idea how to use the interface to map the service entrance to the building. The interface for that doesn’t seem to be hiding under a tree, it isn’t a coffee cup, it isn’t a house, it isn’t a clipboard, it isn’t a folded map. Those are the only things in the GUI except the + button and the menu button that just leads me to the “Settings” menu. I tried the + button, but after picking a location, it wanted me to enter a “comment”, whatever that is, so I canceled. Use words, please: write a tutorial or a reference manual.

There is a setting “Use Google-enhanced Positioning”. Like everything else, it’s undocumented. Does it report where I am to Google? I don’t know, so I turn it off. It might be nice to have enhanced positioning, today I’m in New York City and GPS doesn’t work very well around tall buildings, but I wouldn’t use this at the expense of my personal privacy. Maybe it doesn’t violate my privacy. How would I know?