Author

Staff Reports

Gaia GPS

EFB – Charts and Weather for Aviation

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Anna and I spent a good bit of this winter working on EFB – an app for pilots to support paperless mapping in flight. We are working with GlobalNavSource to develop and market the app. You can download it on iTunes or read more about the iPad EFB app on the GlobalNavSource website.

Even if you aren’t a pilot, feel free to check it out. It will be totally free until later this summer, as we collect feedback and work on it.

There are now apps running on the Gaia GPS mapping platform for traveling by land, air or sea! It’s definitely been fun and challenging to understand maps for all the various ways to move around!

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

How tile-based, Google-style maps work

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

People often ask me how the maps in Gaia GPS work. Here’s the explanation I gave in email today:

All “Google-style” tile-based maps, which ours are, work as follows.

  • At zoom level 1, the whole world fits on 1 tile.
  • At zoom level 2, the whole world fits on 4 tiles.
  • At zoom level 3, the whole world fits on 16 tiles.
  • At zoom level N, the whole world fits on 4^N tiles.

For the MyTopo maps we use in Gaia GPS, you can fit a pretty big park area or city, with the finest level of detail, in about 10,000 tiles. Those tiles will take up hundreds of megabytes of space on your phone.

In Gaia GPS, you can download as many 100,000 tile chunks (increased from 10,000 on August 17) as you want. Gaia GPS Lite is still limited to 10,000 tiles per download.

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

Gaia GPS for Android, v2.0

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

After a long time in development and testing, we have finished Gaia GPS for Android, v2.0. This is a big release because it adds tracking to the app and includes a totally reworked UI.

We used code from Google’s MyTracks open source app to add tracking, stats, and graphs to the app, so hat tip to Google for providing yet another good programming toolkit. Besides tracking, the most striking change is the new home menu:

This release has been in beta for several months now, so if you are an Android Gaia user, check it out. If you haven’t bought the app, you can download the free, ad-supported version.

With these additions, our Android app is much closer in functionality of the iPhone version of Gaia. Up next, we’re working on POI search and GPX exports. Please let us know your suggestions at android@gaiagps.com.

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

Gaia GPS On Sale for $2.99 to celebrate the Verizon iPhone

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Gaia GPS is on sale at it’s original price of $2.99 for a limited time, to welcome all Verizon users to the App Store.

We have continually raised the price of the app over the 20 months we have been working on it, and these days, it usually costs $12.99, which makes it the most expensive hiking on on the App Store by a couple of bucks. We think Gaia GPS is the best GPS app for hikers, and the price tag reflects both the app’s popularity and the long hours we have spent working on it. So, now’s a good time to save ten bucks if you are a hiker 🙂

Gaia GPS and it’s free cousin, Gaia GPS Lite, have been downloaded over 500,000 times. I’m not bashful about saying we make great apps, and many other people will tell you the same. So, if you are going for a hike, make sure you get Gaia GPS before you go.

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

New version of Gaia out today

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Gaia GPS v4.5 went on sale today. Anna and I started working on the app about 20 months ago, and little by little, it’s getting to be a really handy tool. Gaia is definitely the thing I am most proud of making in my entire life, and every time I use it on a hike, it makes me smile.

For this release, we did lots of scrub and polish, and we also overhauled the track/photo emailing functionality to use the native interface. We think people will like being able to compose their track export emails in the normal way, adjust the subject and body, plus this gives better options for sizing photos as they are exported. All in all, I think this is a very nice release.

We have a lot of big plans for the spring and summer. Over the next couple of releases, we’re going to continue to look for bugs, find things to speed up and tweak, and then we’ll have some big features rolling out starting in April or so. We have things like weather, friend-mapping, and offline back-up of track data in the works. Just in time too, because I’m itching for a long trip.

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

Gaia GPS Video on TappedIn

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

TappedIn did a video about Gaia GPS for their weekly podcast. You can view the video on YouTube, or you can download it via iTunes as a PodCast. The 1:44 minute short demonstrates how to use the map downloading functionality of Gaia and gives an overview of other features. Actually, we should have done something like this a long time ago, considering we get requests for just such a thing occasionally! We have been meaning to do a video for a while, but we’re always busy with the code.

Anyways, check it out. It’s a cool video and the production values are very high, since TappedIn is a FOX News production. Don’t worry, there’s no political slant to be found in this video… just Gaia GPS rocking out. A big thanks to Kristin Mulgrum of TappedIn for noticing our humble little hiking app.

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

Fine Local Wine hits the App Store

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Recently, my friend Tom has been working with us to create a new app. Fine Local Wine is an iPhone wine app (iPad/iPhone universal actually) that uses a similar map interface to Gaia GPS, and plots out many thousands of wineries, along with useful info such as phone numbers, addresses, and websites. You can now buy it on iTunes, and visit the website here.

He has many ideas for cool apps to build, and we’re going to work with him over the next couple of months to and help facilitate. This first app is purely functional – intended to help you find a good winery, and to help Tom get a feel for iPhone development. But he’s looking at more game-related stuff for the next iteration, and I think his next project will be the real homerun. With any luck, we’ll liberate him from his full-time job working for Big Banking 🙂

If you want a cool wine app, or you want to help an indie developer get his start, check out Fine Local Wine on iTunes. All proceeds go to helping Tom quit his job!

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

Florida aerial images available in Gaia now

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

We just added a new map source to the Map Store – 2009 Florida aerial photos, covering most of the state. These images are produced by the LABINs governmental agency in Florida.

The subscription costs $9.99/year, which lets you view and download maps for your offline travels. Since this server is costing us a pretty penny to operate, we hope you find these useful enough to justify keeping it running!

These maps are cool for a couple of reasons

  1. You can cache them for offline use. Try that with Google!
  2. The images are from 2009… which means they are more recent than anything you can get on the iPhone/iPad (as far as I know).
  3. The imagery is very high-res and pretty!

If you’re adventuring in Florida, grab these maps.

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

Talking at NACIS 2010

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Today I had the opportunity to speak at NACIS 2010 – a meeting of cartographers, GIS geeks, and map nerds of all stripes. I mean those terms in only the most complimentary of ways, and I hope I qualify for some of them 🙂

The title of the talk I submitted was “Trends in the smart phone market and the challenges of preparing maps for mobile delivery,” but I later shortened it to “Adventures in Maps and Apps.” I spent a small amount of time talking about our experiences making apps, then I had some slides about the market potential for mobile apps, and I wrapped up with some thoughts on engineering and marketing.

It was a fun talk, and I really enjoyed talking with everyone afterwards! I’m looking forward to catching some more sessions tomorrow.

If you’d like to see my slides, they can be downloaded here.

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Gaia GPS

Marinalife on all of your iDevices

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

We recently collaborated with EarthNC and Marinalife to make a marina listings app.

Marinalife has up-to-date information on thousands of marinas, all over the country. This app is totally free, and should work well on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod. Check it out if you have a boat – it maps out the marinas on EarthNC’s NOAA charts, and lets you search a list as well. More to come in this app too!

For tons of iPhone marina listings, download Marinalife’s free app.

0 FacebookTwitterLinkedinRedditEmail
Load More Posts