ckgreenman

Those are some pretty nice icons. However, if it were me, I'd swap the GPS and Web Browser icons. After all, the one you have targeted for GPS is the same as the "Network" icon in Finder and Preferences. The one after movies could be a wardriving icon although I prefer the one aychamo already has. Also, I'd use the hammer for "tools". I'm not quite sure what you's use the "accessibility" icon for though.

Just my $.02.

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aychamo

Well, to be honest, I probably wont use any of those icons. For music, movies, photos, etc, I want to use the icons the Apple uses for their programs, so that there is as little confusion as possible for the user. The same reason I use the Safari icon for the web browser, because the user knows that icon to be the web browser. It would be really confusing if they clicked on the normal web browser icon and the GPS program opened up.

There's a few icons I have in there now that don't really make sense, and I'm trying to find replacements for them. But right now I just need to finish the GPS implementation. It's going really slow, as I have a slew of tests I'm in the middle of. I should have time after Monday.

Aychamo

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ckgreenman

I agree for the most part. I think it's a good idea to use the program icons.


Yeah there are a couple I find wierd too. Namely the dashboard icon on the opening screen since you're also using it in another area. Not sure what I would put in it's place though. Other than GPS, which icons are you looking at replacements for?

aychamo

I completely agree about the Dashboard icon. I may use that one that Jakob posted that looks like a speedometer or whatever. I want something that coveys "Settings", but still has a nice look to it (that matches the other icons). And the GPS one :-)

- Aychamo

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pepsibobby

theres gotta be a way to rip out the functionality of GE but not have to use it, just seems so processor unfriendly.

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aychamo

lol, I wish there was, but there isn't. I've asked a lot of extremely experienced Cocoa developers, and they all say the same thing. As far as GE is currently concerned, the best that a developer can do is load their own controls on top of GE and have at it. That's what I'm doing. But once you size GE to fit your screen right, and the controls come up, it's not so bad. I put it in my car the other day and drove around with it, and it worked fine.

I vagley remember when I was programming a front-end, in Delphi, for Windows (****, it was probably Windows ME, this was at least 5 or 6 years ago), there was some way you could latch on to the window of a running App, using like lWinHandle or something, but there doesn't seem to be much like that in the way of Cocoa. If GE supported more AppleScript commands, I could send it the right commands to size itself automatically for the screen, etc. But at this time, it doesn't suppport anything better.

The truth is, there's just a lack of functional, desirable GPS programs for the Mac, at this time. RouteBuddy is supposed to be working on a lot of new features, so hopefully they will come aound and give us what we need.

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aychamo

I can't stop thinking about this GPS stuff. I really think that GE is phenomenal, in it's ability to let you navigate through real photos of the lands you are in. It's wild when I take out the GPS on my laptop and drive around the island, and with my app running, it lets me see exactly where I am. Especially if you add a little "tilt" option. It would be fascinating for navigating to places you've never been.

[Incidentally, I found on some website a KML file with all these coordinates of high-resolution photos of wild animals in Africa that GE captured. It's amazing to be able to see an actual seal on the beach in Africa.. Although it strikes me as funny that random pictures in Africa are higher resolution than my home back in the States.]

I have an older Garmin GPSV or whatever, that does auto-routing, etc. It was phenomenal when I had it auto-route from southern Louisiana to mid Wisconsin. It charted a near perfect route. The only problems I had were sometimes it would say "merge on I-XX for 129 miles" or whatever, and the directions weren't entirely clear what I should do, and I made a few wrong terms, but they were due to my misinterpretation of the directions. With GE's real life images, you don't have that problem. You can see the actual highways coming up on the screen, and get a better idea of where it is. It allows you to better anticipate where you will be going and what turns you will make.

Of course, the problem with GE at this time is the massive size of the photos (i.e., BugByte cached 2 gigs of pictures from GE and it wasn't enough for a 450 mile [724 kilometer] journey.... My journey to Wisconsin was like 1150 miles) Add that to the fact that most of us probably can't access the internet in the car, and it makes it start to suck. It just makes me wonder what the future will bring in these terms.. Should we could get Google to allow us to create a larger cache, but still, it would never really be enough. Or perhaps to be able to purchase or download the pictures in "sections", like download all of south-east Texas, or the whole state of Rhode Island, or whatever.

Until that's really feasible, I think RouteBuddy has the most potential for getting us a GPS App that we can really use. Although, without Auto-Routing and a decent in-car interface, it's still not that useful to us. And it's a bit expensive at $100 + maps. I dunno.

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Sharkbite86

wow that kinda sucks :S . Maybe we can start a petition to google to make it more programable from the outside?

http://www.petitiononline.com/ ?

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LightningMac

I still think GE is the way to go for now... but maybe we can find another program to give us turn by turn directions... that way if we want to take a short trip and need to see a map of a certain area or town we are visiting we have GE, but for longer trips a turn by turn voice direction would be handy, and it would be cool to have both running at the same time.

pepsibobby

thats what i want, the maps in GE is cool, but just something like TOMTOM functionality. where you see a map, and it tells you when to turn. thats all i want.

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Bugbyte

GPSRouteX DOES give you turn by turn. It will announce them, warn you as the exit comes up, and tell you which way to turn. It uses the route you mapped out in GE and calls the turns using the info in there for the announcements.

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LightningMac

okay then how can we make it simple to integrate them into amp to make the whole experience seamless and easy?(like a one click process?)

JakobMetzger

well, GPSRouteX looks really promising then

aychamo

Well, in my opinion, GPSRouteX doesn't do anything useful. It's like $30, and all it does it announce turns for a route you've already planned out via Google Earth. So you have to load GE, plan the route, then export the file, then load GPSRouteX. But, as BugByte mentioned, if you miss your turn, it doesn't do or say anything until you reach your next "turn". So it's kinda "dumb" in that it can only do one thing.

In all honesty, when I get some time I can implement the exact same thing in AMP, for free. All you have to do is look at the longitude/latitude of the next turn, and then look at your current longitude and latitude. Do some subtraction, and if you are within x units (I think it's radians? Or whatever unit they use, just convert to say a 1/4 or 1/2 mile), and if you are within like a half mile, popup a screen showing the turn information (thats why I wanted help finding turn graphics), and use Cocoa's built-in ability to read the turn information out-loud.

.. But, part of me feels bad to copy the functionality of what the guy made in GPSRouteX, and then just give it away for free. But I really feel that it's not worth near $30. Maybe like $5, but then it is still less than ideal for the in-car environment because the text is so small.

Unfortunately.. I live on this little island, and they don't have any turn-by-turn info here. When I go home over Christmas, I'll have access to it and would be able to test it out more.

If anyone here is intimately familiar with GPS, do you know the units that the longitude and latitude are in? And how much you "difference" between two numbers there needs to be to be equal to say 1/2 mile, 800 meters, etc?

Yeah, I can do all that, but we still have the problem of it being kinda worthless for if you make a wrong turn, or get lost, or want to find some local attraction, etc. (You do need internet to find a route, right?)

Edit: Again, I hope that RouteBuddy will improve and give us what we need. I know that everybody wants a "free" solution, but at some point some of you guys may have to realize that you're going to have to pay to get what you really want.

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ckgreenman

Perhaps this might help.
http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gc.../distance.html

Here's another link that might help.
http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/ma...a_latlong.html

Just found another one.
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/LatLong.html

I think the answer to your question is that it depends on where you are. For example, at the equator (0 degrees Latitude) 1 degree of longitude is about 69 miles while at a latitude of 45 degrees (north or south), 1 degree of longitude is about 49 miles.


I personally like Roadnav. I used it about a year ago (version 0.09something) to drive from California to North Carolina. It had a hard time handling such a big route then (I haven't tried it lately) but that was a while ago. The biggest problem is the lack of coverage (US Only) but according to the latest news there should soon be support for OpenStreetMap.

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