With the 2009 season just one week away, Robert and I decided to head down to Alton Towers to carry out some final Towers Guide testing.

We knew that the 'nearby' feature had some underlying issues, and the only way to solve them would be to do some on-site debugging with the app running on an actual device.

We ran into a number of problems and ended up spending a couple of hours there. The first issue was that 'Nearby' wasn't actually displaying any nearby rides at all, it was just coming up with an empty list. Very strange seeing as last time we were on-site it worked fine.

This is the screen we got:



In order to further investigate we tried calculating directions, and sure enough, it failed. Something was wrong with the location code! After a good while of Robert going through the suspect block of code and debugging it, we still had no joy. It took my inspiring input of "why don't you re-write that bit" (seeing as it wasn't very big) to fix the problem. 30 seconds of typing later and directions were up and running better than ever (literally believe it or not).

At this point, things were looking good:



Ultimately, we went away with everything working apart from the 'Nearby' screen, which for some reason just wasn't displaying results. We'll hopefully have that sorted in time for the parks opening next week, when we can re-test before being ready to submit it to the app store!