Here is the link to Gaia GPS (for Haitian Disaster Relief) on iTunes.
This app has different maps than the normal version of the app, and it will also center on Port-au-Prince when you open it or press “Locate Me,” instead of focusing on you. If you are actually in Haiti though, it will work normally and focus on you.
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.
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.