Links for January 11, 2007
If you’re an Apple Computer user, you’ve realized there isn’t a lot of support for using your GPS with your computer. It’s basically a PC world for this. The GPS manufacturers are aware of this problem and you’ll see more combatable GPS units in the future. If you’re both a Mac user and the owner of a Garmin GPS – you’re in luck. Ben Sinclair has a great article on How to use a Garmin GPS with your Mac. He’ll disusss how you can transfer waypoints and tracks, work with your data, and even run MapSource to transfer maps.
More Links
- GPS Automator Actions – A set of Automator Actions to download, upload and convert GPS routes, waypoints and tracks.
- GeoTagging Automator Action – The GeoTagging Automator Action automatically tags your images with geographical coordinates and elevation data from a GPS track file. It supports a great range of image formats, including many raw image formats like Canon CR2, Nikon NEF and Adobe DNG.
When my Street Pilot 2620 crapped out after many years of use, one of the reasons I bought a TomTom 910 to replace it was that the TomTom has 1st class mac software to manage it. Even though there are plenty of hacky ways to work with Garmin’s on mac’s I felt it was important to support a vendor that realized that, yes, people own Macs.
The TomTom has turned out to be an interesting device. I am, in general, not a particular Linux advocate but the fact the 910 (and the rest of them) are Linux boxes means there are quite a few interesting apps out from other people that you can install. I found a great one that provides a navigation heads-up panel and also allows you to do KML/NEMA frame logging for producing maps. Tripmaster, it’s called. I plan an in-depth write up of it after I complete my first survey with it, maybe in a couple weeks.