As many of you already know, Longitude 1.7 is now available on Cydia, bringing a brand new UI and fixing compatibility with Google Latitude. Longitude stopped working shortly after our last post, due to some changes Google made to Latitude.

At the time we wrote Longitude, there was no API for Latitude, and so we had to reverse engineer some stuff and figure out how to update Latitude as if we were using the mobile web site. Since then, Google has released an official API making updates much much simpler to perform. However, this change also involved changing the login mechanism. Before, you would enter your credentials into Longitude, and we would send those to Google’s login page just as if you had done so manually using Safari. Now, we send you to a Google page where you login and they return a token to Longitude.

This brings us to Longitude 2… the big purpose of version 2 is so that not only is the app an update client, but you can also see where your friends are. The difficulty in implementing that feature is that Google doesn’t provide an API for that, so once again, it requires some reverse engineering and pretending to be a browser. Using the old login method, that would be fine, because once we’ve logged you in, we can request the necessary information and Google would happily return it to us. This isn’t possible using the new login method, since we no longer have your credentials. There are some third party Latitude apps in the App Store that work around this, but using the method they use, the login session is short-lived and requires re-logging in on a regular basis.

That being said, we’re researching some methods of retrieving your friends’ locations without requiring you to sign in all the time.  Hopefully we’ll have some promising results soon!

Is there anything else you’d like to see in a future release on Longitude? Let us know in the comments!