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Comment by uuilly | Hacker News Reader

Garmin has been consistently clueless about how software should be developed and deployed. They are the Verizon of GIS. No surprise that they jettisoned one of their more promising projects.

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Indeed. The MapSource Windows app shipped with their GPS units is an abomination - awful usability packed into a 1996-era UI that looks two notches above an MFC tutorial. The map interaction is modal - you have to switch tools to choose whether you want to pan or zoom! And the logic for road labeling leaves plenty of room for ambiguity - the labels aren't rendered along a path, but are rather in straight lines at some randomly chosen tangent to the road, and sparsely enough that you have to guess that roads near one edge of the screen still have the same names they had on the other side.

The built-in updating mechanism has never worked for me - it helpfully indicates that the update "is estimated to take 3 hour(s), 38 minute(s) to download on a 56k modem". A 56k modem, for a piece of software bought in 2009, whose About box indicates a copyright of 2008.

Hahaha. I sympathize with your rant. I have been a developer in the GIS world for 7 years and I don't own a dedicated GPS. I've always wanted one but the software and data issues leave me face-palming. Why they don't just open the standard / create an API or both is beyond me. Weekend developers writing iPhone apps have created better interfaces than these jokers.

Fortunately you can pretty much ignore the Garmin software and just mount it as a USB drive to get maps on or GPS logs off.

Interesting. Can you tell me which tools you use to work around Garmin? Mac compatible? Are their formats proprietary? Would be stoked for a solution.

The GPS logs are in GPX file format, which is XML based but also easy to parse from whatever your favorite scripting language is.

The map format (.img) is proprietary, but has been reversed engineered, so, for example, there are tools for converting OpenStreetMap data into the format. You can download maps of many areas from cloudmade.com.

I usually download my logs onto a Linux machine, but it works just the same on the Mac (using the device as USB mass storage).

Wow. Thanks.

gpsbabel ftw!

Dealing with Garmin devices is only tough for the new fitness devices...proprietary binary format :( I wrote a ruby module in C to stream parse it which I plan to opensource soonish.

Oh, that's great that you have a tool. I should have said that my reply was for the eTrex *X series that store the maps and logs on an SD card and that things might be different for different models.

I use my GPS to plan routes, however, not just to get from A to B.

Google Maps on mobile devices will eventually displace them.

Problem with Google Maps is that there never is any reception when you need it. Although you are right - eventually there might be (10 years? 20 years?).

Except you could build pre-loading of map data into the app. On Symbian phones with Ovi Maps the app will download map data on-the-fly, or you can choose to pre-load it (for example the full maps for Europe or whatnot). I see no reason Google couldn't do something similar.

Well Google didn't do it. Wish they would.

Google Navigation already does this, apparently. I was checking out one of the state parks in the Santa Cruz mountains a month or so ago. Naturally, I lost my cell reception once I got into the foothills. But Navigation continued to direct me, turn by turn with map, until I arrived at my destination.

I lucked out on GPS though - in some cases, the GPS signal has died just when I need it most. Darn Nexus Ones.

Problem with Google Maps is that there never is any reception when you need it. Although you are right - eventually there might be (10 years? 20 years?).

Look at what the service is about...Google maps has nothing to do with the cool parts of a site for tracking fitness and analyzing performance. It's just a tool to visualize a route. Google has no interest in a niche market like interfacing with proprietary fitness logging devices. They just provide tools to let us niche developers put out things which will display their ads and generate revenue.

This is what you get when you have to take what you can get talent-wise in areas with "low cost of living." It never pays to be cheap.

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