If you are headed to Burning Man this year, you can add a map of Black Rock City to Gaia GPS to help you find your way. From the Map Layers menu on the main map, tap “Add more layers.” The Burning Man source is listed under “Special.”
This map was made as part of iBurn, a free and open source app for Burning Man that we help make.
We shipped a little update to the Android beta again today. This version stubs out the Details screen for tracks/waypoints/maps (most buttons don’t work), and implements a Delete option for everything, and a “Resume Download” option for maps.
We decided the Details screen was a prerequisite for adding waypoint-marking to the app, so that’s why we went ahead with this. There are also various other improvements and bug fixes in the release.
We pushed a new update to the Android Gaia GPS beta today.
We have been getting tremendous feedback from the Android beta group now, so we cleaned up a bunch of bugs people have reported from the field. The version of the beta now also notably supports MBTiles, a data format MapBox published that lets people wrap up bundles of map tiles into a database. So, if you have any MBTiles, Gaia will import and show your tiles as a layer.
We’ve wanted to support MBTiles in Gaia for a while, but we did it now to scratch an itch for Burning Man.
For all of those wondering, we are indeed working on the 2013 updates for iBurn (we get a lot of emails this time a year). There are many contributors now, and we think the apps will get updated every year (and Android will be great this year!). The apps aren’t quite done yet, but we have data to share:
You can use these resources for any project you wish. We consider it all to be open and free, in the spirit of the event. Nine people contributed to iBurn this year, and we hosted a hack day at Trailbehind offices last Saturday to get everything set up – iOS, Android, and the data wrangling. I’d like to acknowledge everyone who contributed:
We pushed a new update to the Gaia GPS Android beta today, which notably brings GaiaCloud to Android, along with a bunch of other improvements.
The Gaia Android beta is available on the Google Play store, for anyone who wants to preview features and be part of the beta test group. If you are using the regular version of Gaia GPS, you’ll get all the beta updates when they are ready for prime time. You can read about the Open Beta for Gaia GPS Android on our blog.
We just pushed an update to the GaiaCloud website, which vastly improves the pages that show your lists of tracks, waypoints, and maps.
The pages are now much easier on the eyes, and easier to scan for the data you want to find, plus the sorting functionality works better. We also improved the speed of this and other pages on the site.
Coming up probably this week, we’ll show thumbnails for tracks in the List and Gallery pages, and we have a new layout in the works for the Track pages.
Constant work continues on the GaiaCloud website. Today, we made the Public Gallery of tracks much faster to load.
The sharing functions on the Track pages have also been moved up to the top of those pages, and we streamlined sharing to make it easier. You can see the sharing buttons on one of my track pages, a trail to a beach in Tahoe.
Now that we have the basics in place, we are working on making the Track, Gallery, and Data List pages much better, since those are the ones people use the most.
Today we pushed a first look at the Gallery page for GaiaCloud. Herein you can see tracks other Gaia GPS users have made public. There are a lot of beautiful trips recorded, complete with photos, graphs, and maps.
You can make your tracks show up in the Gallery too. Visit http://cloud.gaiagps.com, and there is an option on your Track pages. Tap the “Share” tab on any track page, and flip the switch to “Public.” Pretty soon, we’ll add the sharing option directly to the app, too.
The GaiaCloud website development continues in earnest. Next week, we’re going to focus on improving and beautifying the Track and Gallery pages. We also plan to add an option to upload files to the website, to make it easier to import data into Gaia GPS, or share tracks from other apps.
Today, we’re very happy to announce the Open Beta release of Gaia GPS for Android. You can download it from Google Play now.
Going forward, Google Play will have two versions of Gaia GPS – Beta and normal. Anyone who wants to can participate in beta testing, and the normal version will always get updates when they are finished and fully polished. We plan to update the current “normal” version of Gaia GPS to the new code towards the end of the summer. Most users will probably just want the production version of Gaia, but if you’re eager to check out our new cutting edge stuff, you can get the beta, and help us iron out the bugs.
This release is almost a total rewrite of Gaia – the maps are fast and smooth, and the UI has been overhauled on both phones and tablets. By the time this new app leaves beta, it will be extremely similar to the iOS app.
In the past, we have done all beta testing through private distribution. We are releasing a beta version on the Market because:
Any feedback is much appreciated!
Anna and I took Adlai for his first hike this weekend. At 9 months, he’s not much of a walker yet, but he fits nicely into an Ergo baby back pack. You can have a look at our hike down the trail to Skunk Harbor on GaiaCloud.
Anna and Adlai on the march
We haven’t been brave enough to pack the boy into the backwoods yet, because we think it will be a mess at camp. He’d probably crawl around and put everything in his mouth! Once he starts toddling a bit, though, we’ll take him on an overnighter. I didn’t camp much until I met Anna, but one of my fondest memories as a kid was a camping trip my dad and I took when I was a young boy.