How do I move the location by hand?
You do not want to jump somewhere, and you do not want to follow a route from A to B. You want to move a short distance, under your own control, and stop when you decide to.
That is the joystick: an on-screen pad that nudges the reported position live. Push it and the position moves in that direction. Push further from the centre and it moves faster, up to about 6 metres per second. Let go and it stops where it is.
01What it is for
The three ways of moving in GPSLarp answer three different questions. Setting a place answers put me there, in one jump — setting an exact latitude and longitude. Walking or driving answers take me from here to there along the streets — simulating a walk or a drive. The joystick answers the third one: let me steer.
It is the mode for short, deliberate movement — a few streets, a lap of a block, backing up because you went too far. Nothing is planned in advance and there is no destination to give it.
02How it behaves
- Direction is where you push. Down on the pad is south, which is the convention that matches the map above it rather than a compass in your hand.
- Deflection is speed. Just off centre is a slow drift. Pushed to the edge is about 6 metres per second, which is a fast run rather than a car.
- There is a dead zone at the centre. A small neutral area, so that resting your hand on the pad does nothing at all. Movement starts once you are clearly outside it — that gap is deliberate, not unresponsiveness.
- It updates continuously, several times a second, for as long as you hold it. This is the mode that behaves least like a form and most like a control.
- Letting go stops it where it is. The position does not spring back to where you started, and it does not drift on. It stays at the last point it reached, exactly as though you had set that point directly.
03Using it
01Connect the iPhone and select it
As with every mode. If the phone is not in the device list, start at GPSLarp can't find my iPhone.
02Set a starting position first
The joystick moves a position; it does not create one. Put a place on the map the usual way before you start steering, so that you are nudging from somewhere you chose.
03Push the pad in the direction you want to go
Small deflections for a walking drift, larger ones for speed. Down is south. The position starts moving as soon as you are past the dead zone and keeps moving while you hold.
04Release to stop
The position holds at the point it had reached. From there you can push again in another direction, or leave it — a stopped joystick leaves the reported position exactly where a directly set place would have left it.
05End the session when you have finished
Stopping in GPSLarp returns the phone to its own GPS. Putting the real location back covers every way of ending it, including the ones that work when something else has gone wrong.
04What it needs, and what has not been tested
It needs the connection for the whole session. This mode is continuous by definition — it is sending a fresh position several times a second — so anything that ends the connection ends the steering, exactly as it does for a walk or a drive. The Mac stays awake and connected or nothing moves. If the connection will not come up in the first place, that is the tunnel won't start.
The part nobody here has seen
The joystick has two ways of talking to the phone. The one it prefers holds a single session open and sends each tick as one fast message, which is what makes continuous steering feel continuous at all. That path has never been run against a real iPhone in this project. It is exercised only against test doubles — stand-ins that record what they were asked to do rather than a phone that did it.
When that session cannot be established, the engine falls back to the same one-at-a-time method the teleport path uses: a separate command per position. That fallback is not continuous and is not written to pretend it is — it updates whenever the previous command has finished rather than on every tick.
So the honest description of this mode is: it is built to steer smoothly, and the smooth half is the half nobody has watched happen on hardware. A page that left that out would be selling you exactly the part that has not been demonstrated.
Every account gets one free joystick session, separate from the free run of each of the other modes. What you get without paying has the whole arrangement.
05If it does not move the way you expect
Small pushes do nothing. That is the dead zone at the centre. Push further out; it is a small area and it exists so that a hand resting on the control is not a hand steering it.
The movement is jerky rather than smooth. That is the fallback path described above — a command per position instead of a held session. It is the honest ceiling of that method rather than a setting to change.
Everything stops mid-push. The connection went. Check the phone is unlocked and still on the same network or still plugged in, and that the Mac has not slept.
The Mac shows the position moving and the phone does not. That is a different problem with its own page — I picked a place and my iPhone's location didn't change.
The honest limit of this page: it describes what the control does and what the application sends as you hold it. What a particular iPhone does with a stream of positions has not been demonstrated end to end by anybody here, so this page stops at the edge of the Mac.