After we pushed Gaia GPS to Apple to review, Tim, Anna, and I took a a week-long hike through parts of sections J and K of the Pacific Crest Trail. We wanted to take Gaia GPS out for the ultimate test drive while we still had time to pull the app, but also we had been working non-stop for months and just needed a break. It was an epic hike and a wonderful vacation. Since then we have been back at work, preparing the next releases of Gaia GPS.
If you are a Gaia GPS user, you should check out the release notes for Gaia GPS v1.1, which detail the app’s new features and bug fixes. This release has been in review by Apple since a week ago Sunday, so it should get out to users by the end of next weekend.
We are now working on v1.2, which we plan to push to Apple as soon as 1.1 gets approved – it should come out some time in October. For the v1.2 release, we are tweaking some things and including the following major improvements/features. All of these things have been requested by at least one user:
- import GPX from desktop
- enter coordinates or tap map to create a waypoint
- pause/resume current track, and resume old tracks
- include OpenCycle maps
- show scale on map
- guide to waypoint feature
- option to export photos at full resolution
- lock button on map page (now only on the Trip Screen)
We’ve also been getting a bunch of requests for an international version, and we pushed that to the App Store this evening. We actually have a bunch of different versions of Gaia GPS coming out – International, Lite, Maps Only, Places Only, etc. Here’s a screenshot of iTunesConnect showing all of our apps in review.
Gaia Maps and Gaia Places are less expensive apps ($1.99 and $0.99 respectively) that provide a subset of the functionality of Gaia GPS. We think these will be popular and also suited well for use on the iPod.
The Lite version of Gaia GPS is free but limits the user to having one saved track and one saved map at a time. It also doesn’t provide a search function for waypoints.
Finally, the international version uses different default maps, starts with metric units, and a couple other little tweaks.