We hope everyone finds the new header menu on cloud.gaiagps.com a little easier to navigate, and a little more compact.
This isn’t a terribly big change, but it should make people’s tracks and other data easier to find, so we get less emails asking!
We have a lot of other big stuff cooking for the app and website, should be an exciting summer.
Today we rolled out a few new social features on cloud.gaiagps.com. You can go set some profile info, and your public profile page links to your recent trips (here’s my public profile).
This is the bare bones of the feature, and you’ll see it evolve over the next few weeks. Websites (unlike apps) lend themselves to quick, iterative improvement, and we like to take advantage of that. If you are watching closely, you might notice we are releasing the website most days.
Right now, you can set a pic, username, bio, location, and connect with Facebook. Coming up, we’re working on letting you follow your friends, better information-grabbing from Facebook, an improved UI, and more.
Let us know what we can do to make Gaia GPS and cloud.gaiagps.com awesome for you. Email us at support@gaiagps.com, to reach the whole team.
While we are pushing improvements to cloud.gaiagps.com daily now, I want to spotlight one update that went out today – better file imports.
Uploading GPX files on the import page is now much faster, and the site can handle larger files. Files can be up to 50mb, which should accommodate almost any GPX file.
The most important change in version 8.1 of Gaia GPS for iOS is the new ability to “auto-publish” your tracks. There are many smaller changes that you can read about in the releases notes, but that’s the big one.
If you are the sharing type, you can now flip a switch in Gaia GPS to automatically share all of your tracks, on the GaiaCloud public gallery. Or, you can also publish individual tracks rom the Details screen in the app. By doing this, you are helping other people find their way, and letting them use your data to navigate in the forest.
Previously, you could share a track with friends using the app, but to actually make the track public to all people, you had to go to cloud.gaiagps.com. With the 8.1 release, we expect to see an exponential increase in the amount of tracks published, since you can now do it from the app.
Within a few minutes of releasing this update, we are already seeing over 10% more public tracks, and we’ll see many thousands of tracks go public by next week it looks like. Here’s a new public track, brought to you by someone wandering around Italy.
Anyways, lot’s more to come for the season. We’re in the middle of our big spring development effort, and we’ll be rolling out a lot more great changes across iOS, Android, and the web.
Many users have asked us for controls on cloud.gaiagps.com to manage data en masse. So, now the pages to view your tracks (and photos, waypoints, routes, and maps) have typical controls to select many items, and set those items to delete or not sync to your devices.
In software, I really do think it’s the little things that count, and starting off with a simple base and working with users to understand their wants and needs leads to the best sort of software. GaiaCloud started off without any web front-end at all – just a service that synced tracks and waypoints (not even photos or maps) between devices, intended to keep that data backed up, and for convenience. That’s what we considered to be the “minimum viable product.”
With all the effort we’ve been able to put into GaiaCloud recently, though, the project has bloomed terrifically, and the website has become one of the distinguishing characteristics of Gaia GPS.
It’s a big day for GaiaPro, which is extra-special because Gaia GPS is also being featured today on the homepage of Apple.com.
GaiaPro subscribers can now make routes and waypoints on cloud.gaiagps.com (in addition to printing maps). Also, GaiaPro subscriptions now work seamlessly across iOS, Android, and the website, and GaiaPro subscriptions can be purchased conveniently everywhere, too.
The GaiaCloud website is a free resource, which anyone can use. With or without a GaiaPro subscription or app purchase, the website displays great topo and aerial maps of around the world, lets you browse and download public GaiaCloud trails, and upload and share your tracks and photos.
Beyond that, I can also say the best is yet to come. We’re going to keep improving the website, apps, and GaiaPro add-ons, and we have our biggest releases of all coming for spring 2014.
The new release of Gaia GPS for Android is packed with new features, but the most important addition is probably a tool that lets you measure distance and create multipoint routes. We have been thinking about this route-maker for literally years, and we have implemented similar features in our iOS app. This rendition is how we always wanted it to be.
Besides the route-maker, you’ll find new abilities to crop tracks, change track colors, and you’ll see thumbnails for your tracks in your saved list, which makes finding the one you want to look at much easier.
More to come. Let us know what you think at support@gaiagps.com
We just shipped a new Android beta release for Gaia GPS, which you can download here. We’ll roll these changes out to the main app later this week.
This update actually wasn’t as much work for us as some of the last few, but we think you may notice this one more than the others, regardless. It includes a route-making & distance measuring tool, which is even better than our iOS version. I’d call this the Berlin Wall in terms of unifying Gaia GPS feature parity across iOS and Android.
We also added some other very visual features, like showing thumbnails for tracks in the Saved list, and the ability to change track colors by pressing those thumbnails.
You can probably find some differences between our iOS and Android apps now, but the two apps are essentially the same from here. The Android app shines in some respects (like map speed and route-making) that we are going to have to go back and play catch-up on iOS now, too.
Our online map viewer is now to the point where you can link to a set of layers, along with the center and zoom of the map.
For example, here you can see MapBox Cloudless Aerial imagery, overlaid with GMUs, WMAs, and public land ownership. This is a good combination for hunters, and you can achieve the same layered effect, offline in the woods, with Gaia GPS for iOS. Or perhaps you would like to overlay US Forest Service Maps over the more broad coverage of the USGS maps – this is a very typical combination for me hiking around Tahoe.
Like Gaia GPS, this web viewer already brings together a really useful and diverse array of maps from CalTopo, MapBox, and ThunderForest. We are also doing a lot with Leaflet and TileMill now, to expand map coverage, and the tools you can use online with these maps.
These days, everyone “checks in” code at Gaia GPS – all seven of us checked in some sort of technical work this month. Like many software developers out there, we use GitHub.com to collaborate and keep our code in version control, and we see “check-ins” flow in each day.
This is what we do in our office each day, and how we spend the money you spend with us:
Android – Jesse & Anna – Jesse and Anna are both hard at work on our Android app, and we’ll have a new release for Gaia for Android out today.
GaiaCloud – Anting – Between classes at Berkeley, Anting has made many improvements to cloud.gaiagps.com recently, ranging from bug fixes, to KML uploads, to improvements to the Gallery page this Monday – continuing his work from his internship this summer.
Maps – Savannah – Savannah completed two maps using CartoCSS and PostGres, via TileMill – US Inland Rivers and USGS Geology. She also leads our user support, and wears many hats in general.
GaiaGPS.com – Steve – Our website has long been in need of some improvements, and Steve has done a lot to make the site convey more information and behave like a modern website. Notably, you can now browse Gaia maps on the site, and yesterday Steve overhauled the Apps page as well. The GaiaPro page is up next.
Weather – Ryan, aka GutHook – We are working with a Gaia GPS user in Maine who develops his own trail guide apps, to work on our weather capabilities. He checked in a bunch of interesting stuff this week. Like Jesse, Ryan thru-hiked the PCT.
Bugs and Misc – Andrew – As for me, I’ve has to resuscitate trailbehind.com this week, which failed after Google Maps transitioned to API v3. I also did point releases for Gaia GPS and Skipper to address user-reported bugs.