Jesse is off in Nepal for his honeymoon, “dog-fooding” the new version of Gaia GPS for Android. Here’s his latest trip report – he has been keeping a daily diary of the trip.
We have now added the ability to upload KML files directly to cloud.gaiagps.com/upload (in addition to GPX). You can also upload pictures along with tracks, directly on the website.
If you use Gaia GPS on iOS or Android, these uploads will automatically sync to your devices via GaiaCloud, for use in your adventures. You can also use this feature without owning the app, so you can share your tracks and view them on the website.
Gaia GPS users can now use official NOAA raster charts in the app. You can add this source by going to “Add More Layers…” in the layers menu. You can also browse the charts online.
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!
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.
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:
- You can now share links to your tracks and photos in the app, using Facebook, Twitter, and other methods. Here’s a recent public track.
- 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.
Over the years, we have fielded many emails about why GPS recordings are “wrong” or vary from posted trail markers or guides.
So, we put together an article about the various factors involved. It was interesting to read and write, so we thought we’d share this user manual entry on the blog too.
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.
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.
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:
- view the map of Black Rock City 2013 online
- download the iBurn map of Black Rock City as an MBTiles file (which you can import into Gaia GPS for Android beta!)
- pull the map source data and TileMill project from GitHub
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:
- Andrew Johnstone – does the art for iBurn, makes the thing that burns
- Jesse Crocker – map data and Android dev for iBurn, snowy apps and Gaia GPS
- David Brodsky – Android development for iBurn, defends free speech during day
- Chris Ballinger – Android development for iBurn, co-defends free speech during day
- David Chiles – IOS dev for iBurn, mad open sources
- Savannah Henderson – data wrangled for iBurn, support chief for Gaia GPS
- Joshua Braegger – wranged data for iBurn, herds Space Monkeys during the day
- Anna Johnson – IOS dev for iBurn, Gaia GPS dev
- Andrew Johnson – IOS dev for iBurn, Gaia GPS dev