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Comment by uuilly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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