@calj_en Can u pls xplain y Jerusalem wasn't saved and why when I searched for it, I got 'West Jerusalem, Israel' and 'Jerusalem, Jerusalem'
— (((IsraelMatzav))) (@IsraelMatzav) August 13, 2015
Dear User,
Thank you for these two good questions.
—Why Jerusalem was not pre-recorded in the list 5 or 6 built-in cities in CalJ App ?
I have recorded my mother’s home town and my own current home town, which are by definition the two most important towns in the world of course 🙂 plus a few others around the world to demonstrate how versatile and cool the app is on screenshots.
The intention is not to pre-record a big list of cities: it is a favorites list. Just as your bookmarks in your browser. To choose another city — any city in the world — you may use the Search screen, from which you can bookmark your own favorites.
Nevertheless, it is indeed a good idea to pre-bookmark Jerusalem, and I will, ב”ה.
—Why do I get “West Jerusalem, Israel” and “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” ?
Creating and maintaining a database of millions of places in the world, is a hard work and is certainly not part of what I am able or willing to do for my little CalJ app. The Search feature is done through the (excellent) GeoNames free service (and I thank them for it).
Although GeoNames is free of charge, it is a high quality database, and in general politically neutral (from what I could see). Yet, sometimes, we may not agree with their naming of some places, among which Jerusalem. I have already applied a filter in the app, which will remove any reference of so-called “Palestine” in relation to Israeli cities such as Hevron, Jerusalem, and a few others — as can be found sometimes in the GeoNames database (often in dual entries) and any other similar service (such as Google Maps). As a result, the CalJ app stripes out the P word on the fly, when displaying the search results.
One may consider that this is not politically correct and/or evil or racist or *put your own curse here* but — hey I don’t care, it’s my app, and the pro-Palestinians are free to not use it.
I think this answers your question, but nevertheless I am writing down for myself, for a future release, to take the filtering one step further and reunify our Israeli capitol in CalJ. Let us hope that this will constitute one more little step towards the coming of Mashia’ch bekarov.
Shabbat shalom,
Gabriel.