Gaia GPS

Gaia GPS

CarPark! – Dead Simple iPhone Parking App

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Today, our CarPark app went live on the App Store. CarPark may be the easiest way to remember where you parked. This app was developed almost entirely by my co-founder Tim, and he did a spectacular job on it. The Apple approval process was also really fast – just four days this time.

I thought I would blog about this app because the decision-making behind building it was strategic and interesting to me from a start-up/business perspective. Here’s why we decided to build CarPark:

  • First and foremost, there is a large market for these kinds of apps on the App Store. When we started building this, 4 of the top 20 navigation apps were simple car parking apps. While we have been successful with Gaia GPS, the market for an outdoor GPS app is somewhat limited, and we are hoping this one is more mainstream. We saw an opportunity to play to a bigger crowd, using the skills we developed on Gaia.
  • Second, we would like to add Google Maps to Gaia GPS. CarPark gave us the chance to work with MapKit (which you need to use to deliver Google Maps on the iPhone). We use the Route-Me framework for mapping in Gaia GPS, and we would need to use both APIs if we want to add Google Maps, so this was a good way to tinker with MapKit and see how much work the addition would be.
  • Finally, CarPark was fairly straightforward to build given our experience, and we thought we could do a good job. We have spent a lot of time on similar functionality – marking places on maps, giving guidance to waypoints, etc. So, it seemed like an easy win for us.

There are a lot of parking apps out there, but we aimed to make this one simple, fast, and usable. One thing folks may notice in comparing this to all the other CarPark type apps is we don’t have a screen with two big buttons on it to start the app. That design crops up a lot of the iPhone, and it’s just for lack of imagination I think.

So, CarPark! is live in the App Store now for .99. If you have a car (or if you just want to help us get some visibility on launch day), go get it!

Download CarPark from the App Store.

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Gaia GPS

Is this good Chinese

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Hacker News is like a deity sometimes – ye ask and ye shall receive.

A couple of days ago, I had a phone call that convinced me I needed to internationalize my App Store description. To do this, I used the magic of the internet and social networks, most notably Hacker News.

From this post, some wonderful hackers created and even double-checked versions in Dutch, German, French, and Swedish. I also got a version in Spanish from my friend, which the users on HN found a small mistake in.

While it was a lot of hassle getting passed all the scamsters on Mechanical Turk, I also got some useful translations from that service (for $7 each), including Italian and Chinese. However, I am just a little suspicious of the Chinese.

Do you think this document is real Chinese? There is significant variation with the Google auto-generator and it’s way different than Babelfish. I’m a little suspicious because there are chunks that are exactly the same as Google Translate: http://translate.google.com

Can anyone out there confirm this Chinese is good? Here is the document with the translation inline.

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Gaia GPS

Help Translate Gaia GPS to Other Languages

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

EDIT: Thanks to tons of help from Gaia GPS users and folks on Hacker News, we have most of the European languages done now! See the updated list below.

Would anyone out there be willing to translate a small bit of text about Gaia GPS into their language(s)?

By way of compensation, we would offer first and foremost our earnest gratitude. We also have a few TrailBehind t-shirts, or if you are a poor college student or something, we could give you some small amount of money. You’ll also always get a free copy of all of our future iPhone apps.

If you can help us out, please send email to andrew@gaiagps.com so people don’t end up doing the same translation twice.

Here is the text we need to translate: gaia.txt

The languages we could use are:

  • Japanese
  • Russian
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Brazilian Portuguese
  • Portuguese
  • Korean
  • Italian
  • Swedish
  • Canadian French
  • Spanish
  • Mexican Spanish
  • Dutch
  • French
  • German
  • Canadian English
  • UK English
  • Australian English
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Gaia GPS

Gaia GPS, for Haitian Disaster Relief

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

I was sitting around yesterday working on the v2.2 release of Gaia GPS, when a friend and user of Gaia contacted me. Jeff Johnson, who works on digital mapping professionally (and in his spare time with OpenStreetMap), had been contributing to a project to provide up-to-date maps and satellite imagery of the Haitian Earthquake.

Jeff asked if Anna, Tim, and I would be willing to make a free version of Gaia GPS so disaster workers could download and use these maps. Well, we hadn’t done anything for this cause to date, and this seemed like a good endeavor, so we spent the last day and half putting together the app. Hopefully Apple will approve it quickly and make these maps a bit more accessible to relief workers in Haiti.

Here’s a couple screenshots:

It only took us a small amount of work to make “Gaia GPS (for Haitian Disaster Relief)” but a ton of work went into creating the maps, both from the OpenStreetMap community and mapping companies GeoEye and Digital Globe, not to mention the computing power contributed by the New York Public Library and Oxillion.

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Gaia GPS

Haiti Gaia GPS Approved Right Away

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Wow, Apple approved the edition of Gaia GPS with maps of the Haitian earthquake just a few hours after we submitted it to the App Store. They were also kind enough to approve the versions of Gaia GPS and Gaia GPS Lite that we submitted concurrently. Hats off to the Apple employees who took an interlude from their weekend to get this done!

I will post a link to the app as soon as iTunes starts to refresh. You can view the maps on the web here: http://haiti.openstreetmap.nl/

Here’s some more information on the mapping project on O’Reilly.

Twitter is tweeting up a storm too.

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Gaia GPS

Over Six Hours of Battery Life

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

Someone asked a question on our forum about the GPS Accuracy/Battery Life Slider that Gaia GPS had in v1.x, and I had a chance to write up some information about the battery life of the app. I thought I’d share that on our blog too.

Depending on what other programs you have running, on a 3GS Gaia GPS can take almost 6.5 hours of tracks, based on some independent tests from a user.

To get the best battery life, make sure to:

  • Turn off any Push Notifications – I have been told that Yahoo’s push app shaves off 2 hours.
  • Turn off Notifications via iPhone settings (~.5 hours recording time)
  • Turn off Wi-Fi and 3G – (maybe 15-20 minutes each, depending on where you are)
  • Once you start recording, put the phone in standby by clicking the top button to get over six hours.
  • Using the Lock Button on the front or map screen, instead of putting the phone in standby, will shave an hour off the recording time. It’s still pretty efficient though, since the screen will black out when you put it in your pocket, using the proximity sensor.

Also, here are some things Gaia GPS does to improve battery life in the background:

  • Writing to disk efficiently
  • Throttling the frequency of GPS readings based on your velocity
  • Using the proximity sensor to blank out the screen when the app is “locked,” which some other apps copied after we came out 🙂
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Gaia GPS 2.0 Surging up the Charts

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

As the users of Gaia GPS know, v2.0 was a massive release and a big improvement on v1.1. Besides various bug fixes, the release included new features such as GPX imports, pause/resume of tracks, new types of coordinates, more maps, and a dozen other things I won’t list here. Our strategy is just to listen to our users and do whatever they seem to agree on :).

In an effort to get the new version out to a lot of people, we also put the app on sale for $.99, and the response has been tremendous. We’re now back in the top 20 in navigation, and we have gotten a ton of positive feedback both from new users and from our beta test group.

If you are thinking about buying Gaia GPS, get it while it’s cheap! When v2.1 gets approved in a few days, we’re going to raise the price to $4.99, and we don’t plan to put the app on sale again this year. That said, I think you’ll be getting a good deal at either price.

Gaia GPS now flies solo as my only GPS device when I go hiking, and we are steadily working to add all the features our users are asking for. With the snow just beginning to settle around us in Truckee, I’m also looking forward to using Gaia GPS to help me navigate the snow-covered wilds on my skis.

We also have no plans to charge for an upgrade anytime soon – you can expect another major version or two at least before we even consider such an idea.

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Gaia GPS v2.0 is Live

by Staff Reports
written by Staff Reports

I’m happy to announce that Gaia GPS 2.0 went live in the App Store today. V2.0 is a tremendous improvement on the last version, with a bunch of new features and bug fixes. Here’s what’s new in 2.0:

New Features

  • pause/resume, last track remembered at start-up, resume any old track
  • guide to waypoint and guide along track
  • use Decimal, DMS, and UTM coordinates, and type in coordinates to make waypoints
  • app continues recording while the iPhone is suspended
  • map: includes a scale, can be displayed full-screen, and added OpenCycle map tiles
  • photos can be exported at full-resolution, include EXIF geo-tags, and have thumbnails in the photo table
  • consolidated all Saved stuff (bookmarks, maps, waypoints, tracks, and photos) on Saved Screen
  • consolidated settings
  • more settings are remembered (lock contrast, waypoints, labels)
  • added Help section
  • “me-marker” is now an arrow that shows your bearing (or heading on 3GS phones)
  • distance markers and distance chimes (turn on via Settings)
  • zoom in Map keyhole on front screen
  • added clear buttons to search boxes

Bug Fixes/Improvements

  • much faster and more stable on 3G phones
  • fixed various UI inconsistencies reported by users
  • sounds no longer turn off iPod
  • photos are no longer stretched on detail page
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