New Features

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.

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.

We pushed a few improvements to the Cloud website, focusing on the layout and UI of the gallery page. We actually have two cloud websites now – here is the gallery page for Gaia GPS, and here is the gallery page for Skipper.

This set of changes tightens up the layout of the page, and gets rid of a lot of extraneous white space. We also tweaked the colors a bit to make contrast better for reading. In general, we have a lot more we want to do with this page, but we generally like to make improvements incrementally.

I actually don’t touch the server programming much myself, and I focus on the app side, so I was interested to hear that we can deploy changes to both cloud servers with no additional overhead at all. Which is a relief since we have a third one running for a different app in beta!

Also of note, the Skipper Cloud now uses nautical charts for the main base map.

We just pushed an update to the GaiaCloud website, which vastly improves the pages that show your lists of tracks, waypoints, and maps.

The pages are now much easier on the eyes, and easier to scan for the data you want to find, plus the sorting functionality works better. We also improved the speed of this and other pages on the site.

Coming up probably this week, we’ll show thumbnails for tracks in the List and Gallery pages, and we have a new layout in the works for the Track pages.

Constant work continues on the GaiaCloud website. Today, we made the Public Gallery of tracks much faster to load.

The sharing functions on the Track pages have also been moved up to the top of those pages, and we streamlined sharing to make it easier. You can see the sharing buttons on one of my track pages, a trail to a beach in Tahoe.

Now that we have the basics in place, we are working on making the Track, Gallery, and Data List pages much better, since those are the ones people use the most.

Today we pushed a first look at the Gallery page for GaiaCloud. Herein you can see tracks other Gaia GPS users have made public. There are a lot of beautiful trips recorded, complete with photos, graphs, and maps.

You can make your tracks show up in the Gallery too. Visit http://cloud.gaiagps.com, and there is an option on your Track pages. Tap the “Share” tab on any track page, and flip the switch to “Public.” Pretty soon, we’ll add the sharing option directly to the app, too.

The GaiaCloud website development continues in earnest. Next week, we’re going to focus on improving and beautifying the Track and Gallery pages. We also plan to add an option to upload files to the website, to make it easier to import data into Gaia GPS, or share tracks from other apps.