Windows maps download tool for MapThis! by in7ane

[in7ane]

fokia, thanks for that - TomTom (OV2) POI import is now in, and seems to work for files generated by poieditor.com - please let me know if anyone encounters files that don't.

deniska, I've put in the space for Google POI midpoints. Is it just midpoints, or will having an empty part of the two part name always cause problems? If so I'll need to go back through the code and put in a check to change ,, to , ,

I've just slipped in the changes to:
http://homepage.mac.com/f.levin/psp/gmdl29.zip

There seems to be a bit of talk about route planning features lately - this is my opinion on the matter, to get in on the popular issue: to have the PSP do the route planning on its own the following would be required: maps (probably vector) which contain such information as direction of roads and speed of roads (I do not know of a public source for such), an algorithm to work out the shortest/quickest route (I do not know of a publicly available implementation of this, traveling salesman problem anyone?), a POI database of road names, numbers and post codes and lots of other locations (this could potentially be pulled from publicly available sources). Overall I would imagine that it would be impossible to get all of those components for such a wide coverage as the current setup provides, but I may be wrong and Route 66 / TomTom / etc. may be cracked for their components.

In the meantime could I request a few related features:
- Point in the direction of a selected POI and give distance (kind-of like the compass does now, and would also require the selection of a given POI from a file).
- Jump to a POI.
- Lines to connect the midpoint POI in directions (so only the 'corner' ones need to be created). (I will put the Google ones in correct order)
Well actually the first two could be useful in competing with Sony's golf features

[deniska]

tx for the update...
I'll look in tothese features...
Meanwhille I have a question:

Am I the only one, getting javascript errors while trying to access google maps main page through IE?
At the same time Firefox seem to work just fine...

[deniska]

tx for the update...
I'll look in tothese features...
Meanwhille I have a question:

Am I the only one, getting javascript errors while trying to access google maps main page through IE?
At the same time Firefox seem to work just fine...

[EDIT] Never mind, I cleaned the cache and cokies and it's working now...

[vibez]

Did you enter those names for start and end point yourself? Afaik the tool only finds routes to and from City names(Like London, England), and not for places you named yourself(It can't know where that place is, Local.live uses the coordinates then, but the tool isn't able to "grab" them...)

Excuse my bad english, I hope you undestand what I mean

They are uk postcodes. They work fine now thanks to in7ane's tip about adding ",uk" at the end of each postcode.

Local.Live and google maps can both translate postcodes and I persume zipcodes into coordinates

[vibez]

In7ane, I'm going to PM you some official TomTom OV2 that seem to differ from the ones that POIeditor make. I'm not sure what the deal is with them, do TomTom encrypt the data?

[fokia]

fokia, thanks for that - TomTom (OV2) POI import is now in, and seems to work for files generated by poieditor.com - please let me know if anyone encounters files that don't.


There seems to be a bit of talk about route planning features lately - this is my opinion on the matter, to get in on the popular issue: to have the PSP do the route planning on its own the following would be required: maps (probably vector) which contain such information as direction of roads and speed of roads (I do not know of a public source for such), an algorithm to work out the shortest/quickest route (I do not know of a publicly available implementation of this, traveling salesman problem anyone?), a POI database of road names, numbers and post codes and lots of other locations (this could potentially be pulled from publicly available sources). Overall I would imagine that it would be impossible to get all of those components for such a wide coverage as the current setup provides, but I may be wrong and Route 66 / TomTom / etc. may be cracked for their components.

I'm glad I could help...

About the travelling man problem: I think this is a problem that could be solved wit a Simplex Linear programming algorithm (easilly found on the net). But the way to implement it is still undefined 'cause we don't have anything but tiles... Hacking/cracking some vectorial maps is the way to go...
Otherwise, we should have some image processing tool that could "read" the maps roads/direction and create a database for that map... huge task! So that an algorithm could be implemented... I don’t even know if this is feasible...


[edit]

I think everyone may find this info usefull:
http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/gmaptogpx

NOTE: This bookmarklet can create a GPX file based on driving directions, an address search or a local search. The GPX file will contain a route, a single waypoint, or up to ten waypoints, respectively.

this is pretty much what gmdl already does and the code is a bit dated but could be helpfull in some way...

[in7ane]

vibez, that's fixed now - I was not handling the header record properly.

The fix is once again slipped into:
http://homepage.mac.com/f.levin/psp/gmdl29.zip

fokia, thanks - that looks interesting, I'll have a closer look to see if they extract the Local.Live path. And I'm going to see about implementing the elevation data.

deniska, it seems to be a Microsoft security patch related issue (I don't get the errors at home on an un-updated XP SP2, but loading up at work on a fully patched SP2 gives the error, sometimes).

[vibez]

Thanks in7ane. Works a treat now

[deniska]

BTW, I submitted a "beta" 1.5 FW eboot with some fixes and new features in following thread:
http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/sho...656#post212656

Feel free to try it...

[in7ane]

A small update to implement deniska's latest changes, namely multiple icons in a single POI file.

Also, I've finally put in some user friendly features - automatic checking for updates (which can be disabled via config.txt)

And the Google directions now have the midpoints in the correct order.

screenshot:
http://homepage.mac.com/f.levin/psp/gmdl0.2.10a.jpg

source and exe (in /bin/debug/):
http://homepage.mac.com/f.levin/psp/gmdl0.2.10a.zip