Thread: Google Earth Voyager

Originally Posted by sonneboz

Is anyone aware of a product that works like Google Earth Voyager (automatically caches your area of interest for offline GPS use)? It's a windows based program, and am looking for something that runs natively. I could use vmware, it just seems like more of a hassle.

i have been looking into software like this. i have been thinking of using something like this for my front end i am writing. i haven't been able to find a native app yet, however i have found one that is written in C#. the good news there is it is possible to "wrap" C# code in an xcode app that will make it native for mac. i havent tried it yet, but i am going to here soon. i will let you know what i come up with

Forget wrapping C# code. Just look at what the app does and how, then implement the functionality in ObjC... It should not be that difficult - we have done something similar for Google maps before we went for our own navigation and it was quite easy.

Could you elaborate on what you did? You don't have to down right give the code, just curious to see what others are doing with GE

Please note that we did that for Google MAPS, not Google Earth. I am not 100% sure that GE uses the same mechanism for server communication.

We simply analyzed the http communication between the browser and GM server and wrote an application, that downloaded the map tiles for specified area and zoom level(s). After that we run a local proxy with the files cached. I think you could also store the files in WebKit's cache directly, but I am not too familiar with the name conventions, cache indexing etc.

The only problem we encountered was that sometimes the connections were refused when we tried to fetch a large area with all details - my guess is that GM server implements some sort of protection against bulk downloads.