Very impressed with the GPSapp. Lots of nice little touches.

Not impressed with MapsOnUs, but that's not the software's fault.

So is there any other web-based mappers we can screen-scrape to get perhaps better data than MapsOnUs supplies?

a quick search of GPS on freshmeat.net yielded a lot of open source software that we can look at, the most promising being gpsdrive. it downloads maps from Expedia and Mapblast and can fetch it from the net automatically, using scripts.

Cool. I looked at both Expedia and MapBlast, but they didn't seem to give lat/long coordinates on the web. Perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place.

But if one could use the MapBlast site for the source data, that's gotta be better than the MapsOnUs data. In the few tests I did, MapBlast gave me much better and more accurate directions that MapsOnUs.

I don't believe that gpsdrive implements giving directions. I think it just plots where you are on a graphical map.

Edit: Or, rather, that's all it does with the maps from Expedia, et al. You have to program your own waypoints.

gpsdrive doesn't do direction finding, it uses those sites to grab raster images from and plots your position and route on those. search the bbs for gpsdrive, I'm pretty sure i explained this before.

Yeah, I found some moving map software called Hugo

Unfortunately there's no screenshots so I'm having to build it to find out what it does...

Don't bother with Hugo. I used to maintain it. At this point, I recommend Xastir (and don't use the amateur radio features) because it supports more map types, and supports them better.

Oh right. I'm still the maintainer.

The best raw data I've seen so far has been the Vicinity corp maps, the ones that MapBlast uses.

I noticed that there is a "Download to PDA" button on the MapBlast screen. Does the "Mapblast.PQA" file that it provides contain the necessary information, or is it just a screen shot of the map?

You know, it makes me wonder.

If the TripPilot people can strike a deal with Vicinity, why can't we? The entire empeg community would amount ot a very low-usage group of downloads compared to their other customers...

Does the "Mapblast.PQA" file that it provides contain the necessary information, or is it just a screen shot of the map?

It included a list of text directions (not coordinates) as far as I could tell.

Doe this have any bearing on what we're doing with empeg-based mapping?

How open is this anyway, it has a 'members only' link on the frontpage.

But in a way it is probably related, but it also isn't. GIS application are interesting in things like mapping an address to a location, and graphically combining various 'layers' of information in a geographic region.

But they typically don't care whether it's a one way street your driving through, and what the fastest way to get there from here is.

Is there really no way for germans to get routing with gps coordinates via the internet?
I've also read that jaharkes is planning to use Tiger maps for live navigation. Is something available in the same format for germany?