The XDA-Developers forums often turns up some great Android stuff and it is form those stables that we have a new app to tell you about. Being a developers forum (in origin anyway), the palce often has interesting App ideas and finished apps coming out of it. This time it is an app called Advanced Map Live Wallpaper from developer David Horn.

The idea behind this app is certainly very interesting. It takes your android wallpaper and turns into your favorite map and pins your location on it. So the idea is that whenever you see your homescreen, instead of a wallpaper, you get to see your location on the map.

App has been developed by XDA member David Horn and is completely open source. It derives from the Rmaps2 and teh AndNav libraries. You also get a lot map choices — Ordinance Survey, Google Maps, Bing, Satellite, Bing, OpenStreetMap, as well as USD VFR and IFR charts.

Given that this is a geo-location app, there will obviously be the concerns about running it all the time. So David has cleverly made it as low resource intensive as possible. The app uses network locations in order to identify where you are. It can display an accuracy circle if you want, else you can have just the location. Also, to save battery, it turns off whenever the homescreen is not visible.

As for constantly downloading maps — it uses a lot of caching to ensure that you have to download one tile only once. Also, all maps have variable zoom supported on them. So you can view you location at any available zoom level you want.

Even though the app is in beta, it is currently available form the Market for free. The original XDA post notes that the developer requests that all problems be reported at the original forum thread and not be turned into low app-rating.

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