If you need copies of any of our apps for a non-profit, volunteer, or other philanthropic group, we can give you unlimited copies of our Android app, Topo Maps, and we will try to accommodate you with iPhone apps as well.
Forbes is doing a lot of iPad articles these days, and most recently they were interested in the iPad as a navigation device.
This article includes quotes from our users and partners, and me as well. Pretty cool 🙂
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 🙂
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.
Unlike on the iPhone, we don’t have an artificial limit on how many beta testers we can have on Android. So, if you are interested in beta-testing our Android app, the more the merrier!
If you don’t like to take tracks with your iPhone, but you are interested in maps and backcountry nav tools, then Offline Topo Maps is the app for you. In Offline Topo Maps, we stripped Gaia GPS down to the bare essential and redid the app to have a full-screen map display. On either iPad or iPhone, Offline Topo Maps makes for a fast, immersive mapping experience.
- Interested parties can check out the iTunes listing for Offline Topo Maps
- You can also view the Offline Topo Maps manual to get a feel for the app.
Another good thing about Offline Topo Maps is that we took the time to polish the feature set, and we improved some things we have been meaning to for Gaia GPS. For example, in Offline Topo Maps, we made sure the map arrow doesn’t get clipped when it rotates. We never seem to fix “minor” defects like these because we are always busy with other things in Gaia, but for Offline Topo Maps, we were more interested in “works really well” than “has lot of features.” That said, all of these minor improvements also appear in the next version of Gaia GPS, so Gaia is going to be pretty awesome when v3.2 is approved too!
Today we launched v1.0 of Gaia GPS on Android. Gaia GPS on Android includes topo and road maps, offline mapping, location and altitude displays, a widescreen map, and more. Next, we are planning to port over more features from our iPhone app – GPS tracking, waypoint marking, additional map types, and other cool stuff.
You can download a demo version here. This version of the app restricts map caching, unless we have your IMEI/MEID registered for beta testing.
This link will bring up the app on the Android market, but it will not work in a browser: Gaia GPS on Android.
Also, please let us know what you think. We are tracking user requests and bugs, and we’ll base our development plans on the feedback we get. You can email any comments, bug reports, or feature ideas to android@gaiagps.com.
Here is a picture of the main map screen:
And here’s one of the download screen, where you can cache maps for offline use:
This was the final track Anna and I took that let us know Gaia GPS 3.0 was ready for a store launch, not that this bit of testing really compares to our stalwart beta groups tests.
We took this track on a long-planned vacation to backpack on the big island of Hawaii. It runs from Waipio Beach to Waimanu Beach. Here it is on trailbehind and everytrail.
I am going to blog about this hike and add my photos later on, but we have been really busy with Gaia since we got back, so I haven’t gotten to do it yet. In summary, it was a cool walk with a lot of up and down, and this trail is the only way to get to Waimanu Valley unless you are a really strong kayaker.
Coming up in 3.2, we are launching the Map Store, as well as iPad compatibility.
We sent Gaia GPS 3.0 to the App Store last Friday, and we hope to see it live any day now. 3.0 is an almost complete overhaul of Gaia GPS. For a little preview, you can see some pictures that we prepared for the user manual online now.
Anna and I have also been using our backpacking vacation in Hawaii to do some comprehensive tests on the app, and you can see a long track we took of a trip from Waipio to Waimanu.
Gaia GPS users will notice a totally new look and feel to the app, as well as a bunch of new features:
- live altitude and speed graphs
- customizable stat overlays on the map (overlay your choice of stats and graphs)
- an overall trip computer for long term stats
- retractable map controls, and a full-screen landscape map view
- sunrise/sunset times
- a horizontal compass on the map that can be hidden with a touch
- fast, native graphics, skinnable to any colors you’d like
- now in Chinese, Portuguese, and Swedish, with Spanish and German coming in 3.1
So, there are a lot of improvements in Gaia GPS 3.0, and we hope all of the people who use the app enjoy it as much as we do! We have been steadily working on Gaia GPS since last summer, making incremental improvements, but for 3.0 we decided to overhaul the whole thing. We think you will find the app is now reliable, fun-to-use, and customizable for whatever activity you are mapping or tracking. I hope it helps many people on an adventure or two this summer.
We are now working on a port of Gaia GPS for Android. If you have an Android phone and you are interested in being a beta tester, email me at andrew@gaiagps.com.
We have just now begin to storyboard the Android app, and we plan on having our first release at the end of March or beginning of April. The first version will be a subset of the features of Gaia GPS, and we will work to get it more feature complete as the spring wears on. We are thinking that we’ll launch offline topo maps first, and add GPS tracking and the rest later.
So, if you want to give us feedback on what features to include and what Gaia GPS for Android should look like, drop me an email.