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Gaia GPS

EarthNC Marine Charts

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

We are excited to announce a new app.

From our partner EarthNC, Marine Charts is a full chart plotter solution that works universally on iPhones, iPads, and iTouches. Whether you are cruising, fishing, or sailing around the ocean, this app will be a lot of fun. Here it is on iTunes.

The app presents full US NOAA marine charts, along with deep weather, tide, and POI info. It leverages the base mapping, routing, and place search software we built for Gaia GPS, heavily customized for a nautical experience.

You can view the maps and data online at EarthNC’s online chart viewer. You can see details about the app’s iPhone Marine Charts on earthnc.com.

I’d love to hear from any Gaia GPS users whose interests span both nautical and terrestrial pursuits. Drop me a line at andrew@gaiagps.com.

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iBurn 2010 Now Live on the App Store

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Today Apple accepted “iBurn 2010,” a free, open source app that our team helped build for Burning Man. Download it on iTunes here.

The app was written last year by long-time burner Jeff Johnson, and this year, we used some of our experience with our outdoors apps to make iBurn 2010 cache data and maps for offline use. You can download and build the app yourself – this is the first time we managed to get this on the App Store, so we hope it sees much wider use this year. It’s worth noting that Apple was very helpful and responsive in getting this posted.

iBurn 2010 makes use of the API provided by Burning Man Earth, and it displays info about camps, art, and events. Most importantly though, it has a map that will help you not get lost in BRC 🙂

If anyone is interested in working on the app, please feel free to hack away, or get in touch with me at andrew@gaiagps.com.

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Product to Platform

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

We launched our first partner iPhone app today, a marine boating app from EarthNC. Since PG likes to talk about platform-izing a business, and that’s an idea that has driven us to where we are, I thought I’d blog a bit about this for Hacker News.

More Money Than Our Apps

After many months on the App Store, we have built our own app sales up to beyond ramen-profitable, and we anticipate significant growth going forward, even in our outdoor/hiking niche.

However, licensing our software to create mapping apps will be our bread and butter from now on (we think). We have secured deals with a few partners, and you can read about EarthNC and another company we are working with in Forbes. By white-labeling our software for partners, we can expand into activity verticals and markets that a) we don’t know anything about and b) can be much larger than our space.

Our Value to Partners

For companies who have maps and other geo-tagged content, we have found that the work we did in building Gaia GPS simplifies their entry into the mobile market. Some key points to this are:

  • our software runs on iPhone/iPad/Ipod and Android, which means partners can get into all the markets fast
  • we provide core functionality that any app will need – map display, routing, POI search, and other things
  • our software has been tested millions of times in the field, by hundreds of thousands of people

I think there are a few other reasons why these business deals make sense, but these three are the main ones. Our platform lets content companies get to market fast, with well-tested and well-reviewed map software. If I had to boil it down to the essence in the manner of Paul Buchheit, those would be the three.

Scaling Our Life

My co-founders and I write a lot of code. Nearly everyday, we’re hacking away on some feature or another to improve Gaia GPS. Now that we are providing underlying code to others, it feels like we are doing a lot more. We’re able to help more companies and developers build stuff, and help more users explore the great outdoors (and the high seas).

In some circumstances, we have to build very app-specific things. For example, we’ll pretty quickly add an “anchor alarm” to the boating app. However, in a lot of cases, work will span all of our apps. Core features like “heads up” mapping, and the satellite maps and offline POI caching we did for EarthNC, will make all of our apps and our partner apps better. It’s a very intriguing feeling to have your life scale up.

Product to Platform

It is only the journey, which has taken us halfway from product to platform, that has even made these partnerships possible. If we would have set out to make a platform at the beginning, we would have surely failed. Only by creating products, and both failing and succeeding at times, have we arrived at some code that is truly useful to a lot of people. And I imagine that’s how most platforms happen. First you scratch an itch, then you find some itchy people.

You can get the Marine Charts app on iTunes.

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iBurn 2010: Burning Man on Your iPhone, iPod, and iPad

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Yesterday, we pushed “iBurn 2010” over to Apple for review. The app is free and open source, works on all iDevices, and provides OpenStreetMap slippy maps, as well as info about Burning Man and Black Rock City. We are hoping it gets approved before the festival begins.


Map of Black Rock City on the iPhone

The project was started by my friend Jeff Johnson last year. It didn’t quite make it to the App Store for distribution in 2009. This year, Jeff, Tom Longson, Anna, Tim, and I conspired to get the code ready to go. Kim Rullo, who does all of our design work, designed the splash screen and app icon, late at night and at the last minute due to my disorganization!


iBurn 2010 splash screen, by Kim Rullo

You can download and build the app yourself; however, please note the 2010 data is not in place yet, so the app will look incomplete. If you switch the controllers to point at the 2009 data, it would work better.

Jeff constructed the entire app – map views, tables, and detail pages – and what our team worked on was making the app more functional offline. Since our hiking apps all revolve around offline functionality and maps (which you need on the Playa), we had some good resources to make the app cache maps and data. We also made it iPhone 4 and iPad compatible, since that is something we have worked on a lot recently.

Below are some screenshots, along with the description we posted for the App Store. We hope this helps festival-goers and onlookers alike. And we hope to bump into some of you in the desert 🙂


The favorites screen, where you can mark events, camps, and art you want to see (swipe to delete)




A Map of Black Rock City on the iPad





Details for an event – details let you tap blue items (coordinates, camps, urls, and emails) to bring up more info

And here’s the description we put on the App Store. The app is still a work in progress, but we think it will serve people well this year. If we get a few more burners developing next year, it will be even better!

iBurn 2010 App Description

Whether you’re going to Burning Man, or just interested, iBurn 2010 is your guide to al the art, camps, and events in Burning Rock City. iBurn 2010 is also open source and totally free.

The app is built to be used offline, within BRC. When you first turn it on, it will cache maps and info about Burning Man to your device. It will also cache any webpages you view via the app.

Feature list:

  • caches the maps and API data on start-up (progress bar on map)
  • buttons on map to re-cache maps, locate self, and center on the city
  • detail pages can center on the item on the map, and show a pin for the place (tapping the pin shows details)
  • detail pages also have clickable urls and clickable emails
  • any webpage viewed via details gets cached
  • events are linked to their camps, so you can locate events
  • save favorites (and delete them by swiping)
  • works on all iDevices, and is fully auto-rotatable
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Use Good Reader to Download GPX for Gaia

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

This advice came in from a user in our beta group. Use Good Reader to import GPX to Gaia GPS on your devices:

A great thing about Gaia is the ability to import gpx files into the app. I found an easy way to do this on the iPhone or iPad without having to use a computer.

There’s an app called good reader that allows you to login into a web site and download files (like backpacker.com or every trail) you can then email the gpx files within good reader to upload@gaiagps.com.

This works great and is pretty easy. No need to use a computer any more.

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Gaia GPS founders getting married

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Anna and I first met in San Francisco, just over 3 years ago. Before I met Anna, I had never gone backpacking, never hiked more than a couple of miles, and I have certainly never loved and respected a woman so much. So, thank goodness she didn’t turn down my marriage proposal last week!

All of you Gaia GPS users can rest assured that we will continue to toil together on your behalf for many years to come 🙂

Check out our wedding website

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Gaia GPS and Offline Topo Maps 4.0 Releases Due Any Day Now

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Update: Offline Topo Maps was approved today, and I got an email from Apple saying they would expedite Gaia GPS and Lite, so hopefully those will get processed too.

We have been getting tons of emails about Gaia GPS and Offline Topo Maps not working under iOS 4.0. Please accept our apologizes for not having our updates done when 4.0 was pushed.

For any other concerned users out there, we pushed new versions of the apps to Apple over a week ago, and we think they will be approved any day now.

We should have been more on top of the release cycle, and pushed these updates sooner, but since we didn’t, Apple’s infernal review process is killing us.

You’d think that after pushing dozens of updates to Apple over the last year, they wouldn’t have to scrutinize our releases for weeks. I know that it’s on us to keep up with the OS releases, but Apple could improve a lot of developer lives (and user lives) by abolishing or reforming the review process.

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