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AndroidGaia GPS

New Android beta for Gaia GPS

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports
We pushed an updated Android beta to the Play Store today, which anyone can download.
This version displays tracks really quickly, you can delete added map sources, and many other improvements (see release notes on the Play Store). If you are interested when we plan to replace the main version of Gaia GPS, you can get a sense of what we feel like we have to do from the Trello board, which is our roadmap.
All of us at TrailBehind now use the new version instead of the old, but we don’t quite have the feature parity we want to replace yet. We’re getting really eager to ship this to everyone!
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New Maps

Colorado Game Management Units (GMUs) for hunters in GaiaPro

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

We added another layer for hunters today, showing GMU outlines and labels for Colorado. In honor of the US Government firing up again, and the National Map coming back online with it, here is a screenshot showing GaiaPro with the National Map, overlaid with Public Land and Colorado Game Management Units.

As with the other overlay layers, this one is available in Gaia GPS under “Add More Layers…,” but you will need a GaiaPro subscription to make the most use of it. If you are following these blog posts and I sound like a broken record about the GaiaPro thing, it’s because people will search and find these posts later, and not read the whole series about the hunting layers.

Here’s a look at the GaiaPro layers menu:

 

We now have all of these layers for hunters:

We’ll get this all working on Android as soon as we can too!

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New Maps

New hunting layer in Gaia GPS for Montana

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Montana hunters can also now overlay game districts for elk, deer, and mountain lions. You can add this layer by going to “Add More Layers…” in the Layers menu on the map. You can also browse the layer and add the source to Gaia or other TrailBehind apps at this link.

As with the Public Land Ownership data we released yesterday, this layer is mostly useful to GaiaPro subscribers, because it’s best overlaid on a topo or aerial map. All Gaia users may find the layer somewhat useful.

Here’s a neat screenshot showing a composition of MapBox Aerial + USFS + Public Land + the Montana districts, with transparency.

Here’s another showing USGS topo + Public Land + Montana hunting.

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Gaia GPS overlay premium membership screenshot
New Maps

Public Land Ownership data available in Gaia GPS

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Check out an updated public lands layer here.

One of the most common requests we get from Gaia GPS users is for Public Land Ownership data, which is useful for hunting, fishing, exploring, and even business purposes. Today, we’re making a land ownership layer available in Gaia GPS.

You can add the public land layer within Gaia GPS by going to “Add More Layers…” This overlay won’t work very well unless you have Gaia GPS Premium, because it needs to be layered with other base maps. You might have some basic use for it as a regular Gaia user.

We consider this to be a “beta” effort, and we’re releasing it to you because it’s useful to us, though incomplete. It has excellent coverage of California, fairly detailed coverage of the rest of western United States, including Alaska, and federal lands in the east. Here’s a summary view of the coverage, and you can also view the layer on gaiagps.com:

Screenshot 2013-10-15 15.31.06

The colors are defined by the following legend, and there is also an entry in the user manual with this info. We’ll integrate it better in the future:

legend

Here’s a screenshot using the layer with GaiaPro, on the iPad. I’m showing the weather panel just for fun, too:

public lands map gaia gps

Gaia GPS premium layers capability really shines here, and you can composite a vast amount of information, including USGS topos, MapBox aerials, Forest Service (USFS) maps, weather overlays, and your personal waypoints and tracks.

Today, our public land data collection efforts are stymied a bit by the shutdown of the US government, but we have plans to complete the data set, and integrate it more fully into Gaia GPS, with an interactive legend and alerts.

This project started out from one of our team’s personal interest in hunting (Jesse), and it’s an ongoing effort. Jesse last lived in Montana, before coming to Berkeley to work with us, and he depended on Elk he hunted for food. As with the rest of Gaia, this comes from the needs of people who spend a lot of time in the woods.

Finally for the technically-minded people. you can also view this GitHub gist for how to set up a tile server like this yourself.

 

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Gaia GPS

The Government Shutdown Strikes Again

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

The US government shutdown has now rippled all the way into Gaia GPS! Two non-essential services we use from the USGS (their elevation lookup API and the National Map) are currently not functioning.

You can see the official notice on the USGS site. Thankfully the charts we feed into our NOAA charts app Skipper from the government are deemed too critical to take down for the purpose of political theater.

In the meantime, we’re going to switch our elevation look-ups to use a commercial API for v8.1, which will have the added benefit of working internationally. The National Map will just have to wait until Uncle Sam and all of his besuited lackeys in Washington decide to do their jobs, but there are of course many analogs for this map source in Gaia.

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Gaia GPSNew Features

Gaia GPS 8.0 is Live

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

We are delighted to announce that Gaia GPS 8.0 is live on the App Store. Gaia 8 is our most ambitious release ever, and we have been working on it since the beginning of the 2013, even while pushing the 7.x releases for Gaia GPS.

Gaia GPS 8.0 on iPhone

Besides completely updating the design of the app for iOS7, we overhauled the UI on iPhone and iPad, made the maps more responsive, fixed a number bugs and quirks, and added a variety of new features. You can see the full release notes here, but I want to call out a few notable changes:

  • Gaia Pro, previously called Gaia Green, has been greatly expanded to include weather and tide information, as well as beautiful aerial and road maps from MapBox, and we also improved the layered map UI. Here’s a screenshot that captures the new maps, weather, and layers UI on iPad;

GaiaPro on Gaia8

The track recorder is now housed in a drawer on the map on iPhone, it can be arranged to show whichever stats you want on top (double to to arrange), and we improved the UI to make it clear when you are tracking, and to let you name the tracks as you record.

Gaia 8 Track Recorder

The team is a little bigger these days too, which has really let us do more with the app. I can say it’s been a real pleasure working on Gaia 8 with these folks. Our East Coast colleague, Steve, is not pictured.

From left to right, Jesse, Savannah, Anting, Andrew, and Anna.

We are going to push a small update, v8.0.1, based on your feedback. Please send any comments to support@gaiagps.com.

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New Features

Upload GPX files to cloud.gaiagps.com

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

We added a new page today where you can upload GPX files directly to GaiaCloud.

This is an interesting development for a couple of reasons. It means anyone can now use GaiaCloud… even if you don’t have an iPhone or Android, you can make a GaiaCloud account to upload and share tracks. Second, this is a convenient way to sync a GPX file to all of your devices running Gaia GPS, from any computer.

We’re going to add photo and KML uploads to the website probably next week… just GPX files for now.

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Gaia GPS

Experiment Sale: Offline Topo Maps is .99 for the Weekend

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Offline Topo Maps is on sale for .99 (instead of 9.99), at least through this weekend.

This is a price experiment, because we noticed about 40% of people who buy OTM end up purchasing the “Gaia GPS” upgrade in the app. This upgrade transforms OTM into our full-featured outdoor app, Gaia GPS. It might make sense for us to keep the price of OTM low, which would be good for users in general. We’re not sure if this will work, because it has implications for load on our servers, support staff, and sales of Gaia, but we can see how it goes for a few days.

If this sale works out, we’ll likely then increase the price of the Gaia GPS upgrade, so the cost of OTM + upgrade remains the same as buying Gaia GPS directly. For now, you get a better deal buying OTM and then upgrading, because we didn’t want to cause any unexpected price hikes for people who just bought OTM, expecting to upgrade to Gaia.

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New Features

Track page updates – graphs, maps, and photos

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

The Track pages are probably the single most important part of the GaiaCloud website. It’s a challenge to figure out what information to show, and how to show it, so that each Track page tells a story.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve done a lot of work to improve these pages. Here is an example track page from our recent company trip to Vermillion Valley Resort.

We initially just made these pages a big map, with some tabbed information at the bottom. But now the Track pages show the stats, graphs, photos, and waypoints all together, with less emphasis on the map. Particularly when sharing a page with friends, we think this is more what people want. Also, besides the overall layout, there is now more hidden functionality, to show things like where photos fall on the map, and how the graphs interact with the tracks. You can also download the data file in convenient ways – both as standard data forms (GPX/KML), or by syncing the track into your own GaiaCloud.

We still have a long way to go, even with these pages, but we think they are starting to be very easy-to-use and functional.

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