Support

FAQs

What kind of data can be shared?
We try to enable the trans­fer of as much data types as pos­si­ble. Due to Apple restric­tions you can only share con­tacts, text, book­marks and images from the iPhone. Android is much more open and thus we can uti­lize other appli­ca­tions as data providers. So with Android you can addi­tion­aly share music, your cur­rent ring­tone and arbi­trary files (pdf, zip, doc, xls, …) from your sd card.

What is the max­i­mum range to hoc some­thing?
We ensure you can hoc within 100 meter.

Can I hoc files between Android and iPhone?
Of course you can! Hoc­cer has been devel­oped to trans­fer infor­ma­tion between arbi­trary inter­net devices.

Why does the Hoc­cer App warns me about incac­cu­rate loca­tion?
To make infor­ma­tion trans­fer between devices as easy as you expe­ri­ence with Hoc­cer, we need to deter­mine your geo loca­tion as exact as pos­si­ble. Indoor your phone may not be able to acquire good gps data. In this case we relay on wifi access­points (also see the next question).

How could acti­vat­ing wifi pos­si­bly help to hoc?
We try to use wifi access point sight­ings to iden­tify your loca­tion. Even if your inter­net con­nec­tion is estab­lished by your data provider we rec­om­mend to acti­vate wifi. You do not need to actu­ally con­nect to an access point. Only make sure Hoc­cer is able to see the wifi net­works around you. Espe­cially indoor this improves reli­a­bil­ity alot.

What is the dif­fer­ence beween drag­ging and throw/catch?
Drag­ging con­tent from one screen to another uses the drag n’ drop metaphor to ini­ti­ate one-to-one data exchange. A third per­son doing the same move­ment near by and at the same time will inter­cept the whole trans­mis­sion. Throw­ing and catch­ing how­ever is a one-to-many dis­tri­b­u­tion. So there is only one thrower allowed but an arbi­trary num­ber of catchers.

How can I hoc to sin­gle per­son only?
Use the drag­ging ges­ture by mov­ing your data with your fin­ger from one touch screen to the other. When you throw some­thing, every­one who is in range and does a catch ges­ture in time will receive your data.

Why does Hoc­cer need access to my per­sonal infor­ma­tion like con­tacts and browser his­tory?
With Hoc­cer you can share your con­tacts or book­marks. Thats why Hoc­cer needs access to it. For more details see our related blog post.

While installing Hoc­cer App, I answered ‘no’ mis­tak­enly for the ques­tion of loca­tion. Is there any other way to change the set­tings later?
Yes, there is a way to allow Hoc­cer to read your loca­tion. Just go to set­tings of your phone, choose “Gen­eral” and then “Loca­tion Ser­vices”. There you will find Hoc­cer and you can on/off the settings.

I can not find Hoc­cer in the Android mar­ket. Where is it?
The mar­ket only shows appli­ca­tions com­pat­i­ble with your ver­sion of Android. That’s Google’s pol­icy and we try to sup­port all Android ver­sion as soon as they get announced and be as back­ward com­pat­i­ble as pos­si­ble. Our cur­rent Android ver­sion is avail­able from Android Ver­sion 1.6 up to 2.2.

I have some prob­lems with my con­tacts on Android 2.x. What’s wrong?
The con­tacts API changed in 2.0 and it took some time to catch up. Since our Hoc­cer v1.5 release every­thing should be fine again.

Why does Hoc­cer not work cor­rectly on HTC Eris, Hero and Tat­too?
We fixed some bugs related to these devices. We try hard to sup­port Hoc­cer prop­erly on all devices. If you occure strange behav­ior and can repro­duce it, please con­tact us.

How does Hoc­cer trans­port the files from phone to phone?
Well, first of all, it does not use Blue­tooth. Hoc­cer needs an inter­net con­nec­tion. If you throw a file, it is tagged with your cur­rent loca­tion and send to a server. When some­one per­forms the catch ges­ture within a few sec­onds Hoc­cer con­tacts the server and asks for pend­ing files at the receivers loca­tion. If both loca­tions are in range the file is sent to the receiver.

How does Hoc­cer locate my posi­tion?
Hoc­cer checks the wire­less access points in range. If both peers sighted the same access point you don’t need a GPS loca­tion to hoc files. If no com­mon access point is found Hoc­cer tries to get a GPS posi­tion. If GPS is not avail­able, the ‘net­work loca­tion’ is used as a fall back. Please keep in mind that Hoc­cer requires a decent loca­tion fix­point to func­tion prop­erly. Spe­cially the fall back data might not be good enough. How­ever, it will work as long as all peers agree on the same (wrong) location.

How can I hoc between my phone and my com­puter?
We imple­mented a Hoc­cer web­client. Point the map to your cur­rent loca­tion and use the wid­get on the right-hand side to hoc files. It’s not per­fect so we are work­ing on a much bet­ter solution.

How can I hoc my files with­out using a motion ges­ture?
We sug­gest using the sweep ges­ture. Also you can use our web­client to hoc files.

Where are my files saved after receiv­ing?
On Android files are stored in the DCMI/Camera folder. We just dis­patch the stor­ing to the default Android Gallery as described in our Blog post. You should be able to open the file again via the His­tory.
On iOS files are stored in the appli­ca­tion itself and you can access them with iTunes or open them in other Apps like iBooks.

After receiv­ing an image I can’t find them in the gallery! Same for music and con­tacts.“
If the image has been suc­cess­fully trans­mit­ted, we store it in the Hoc­cer His­tory. Now it should be acces­si­ble from gallery. It could be a prob­lem if the gallery is still run­ning in back­ground, then it might be nec­es­sary to exit the gallery with the back but­ton and to restart it. Now the received image should be vis­i­ble in gallery. Same solu­tion for music or contacts!”

Is it pos­si­ble to send Android Apps through Hoc­cer?
Yes, it is pos­si­ble if you have the appli­ca­tion stored on your sd card. Just open a file-manager like Astro or the one from Open­In­tents and choose “share” from the options. The menu will include Hoc­cer. Since ver­sion 1.75 it is pos­si­ble to share any of your installed appli­ca­tions: The receiver of your app will be redi­rected to the Android Mar­ket where the App can be downloaded.

Do you plan­ning to sup­port Black­Berry, Sym­bian, Bada, …?
We would love to see Hoc­cer on these devices and a lot of other plat­forms. But it would take lot of resources to develop them all by our­self. We are going to release our Hoc­cer APIs very soon so that devel­op­ers can start imple­ment­ing com­pat­i­ble clients for devices we are not able to sup­port directly.

Try to load image file on Hero and Tat­too, but no image pre­view avail­able.
Unfor­tu­nately the HTC Sense inter­face does not cre­ate thumb­nails in the same way as other Android Sys­tems and hence we need to find an other way to get a image pre­view. We hope to find the solu­tion soon.

I want to share, but I get always “no receiver found” error. What is the tip?
Make sure you really drag the con­tent from one screen to the other. If con­tent is only dragged out of one screen but not dragged in on the other screen you’ll get the “no receiver found” mes­sage. When only drag­ging in you’ll get a “no sender found” mes­sage. So it’s impor­tant to do both com­ple­men­tary actions at almost the same time. This is also true for throw ‘n catch.
Please note that the Hoc­cer App has two modes: a share mode in which you have con­tent on the screen and a receiver mode where the screen is empty.