Comments on: Geocaching with TomTom: a Mac/ Palm solution

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:51:23 +0000

Thanks Francesco for the link to your donationware; looks like a useful app for editing POIs and an opportunity to learn a little Italian too :-)

By: Francesco

Francesco — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:21:14 +0000

For view and edit TomTom ov2 poi you can use PoiView for Mac avaible at SampoSoft web site.

By: Donna

Donna — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 13:40:55 +0000

Hi all. I wanted to come back and comment on my earlier post. For some reason, the errors I was experiencing must have been human error (meaning me). I don't know what changed but once I started downloading Pocket Queries, everything has been dead on.

(BTW, if you're not familiar with Pocket Queries, they're brilliant! You can skip the manual processes off adding more than 1 POI at a time. You set a certain number of criteria and geocaching.com will send you a compressed file of up to 500 caches that fit that criteria. Very cool.)

And Bruce, thank you for making this infomation available. I don't know if the same information is elsewhere but this is the only place I've found it and it has dramatically improved my geocaching experience. Thank you!

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 06:18:03 +0000

That is odd Donna. I've not tried this myself for a while now, but will pay attention next time I do. Thanks for raising this as a potential issue.

By: Donna

Donna — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:28:47 +0000

Hi all. This has been great info. I was able to convert and upload to TomTom 6. (And Lorenz, the multi listings was most helpful.)

Now that I've been able to actually do it, has anyone else had the problem that somewhere, somehow the long and lat coordinates change during the process? I look at long/lat at geocaching.com and then open the geocaching.ov2 file in text editor and they're not the same coordinates. And it don't mean the addition 2 - 3 digits that round up to the number. I mean way off.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Thanks!

Donna

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 07 May 2006 21:00:39 +0000

Thanks Lorenz, that's exactly what I do, as described in the above procedure (see the blue "Info" box) ;-)

By: Lorenz

Lorenz — Sun, 07 May 2006 16:19:05 +0000

Sorry, the xml-code got stripped of. Here once again:

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?
loc version="1.0" src="Groundspeak"
waypoint
* waypoint 1*
/waypoint
waypoint
* waypoint 2*
/waypoint
waypoint
*waypoint xyz
/waypoint
/loc

By: Lorenz

Lorenz — Sun, 07 May 2006 16:12:02 +0000

In case you get tired of going through the procedure described avove for every single POI you want to add to your palm, here's a way to make up a list so your POIs appear in Tomtom as a custom categorie:

Combine the .loc-files before converting them. A .loc-file contains a xml-code that goes like this:

*the information about your POI*

Now simply open all the loc-files you want to add and copy-paste the waypoint-sections in one file, like this

* waypoint 1*

*waypoint 2*>

*waypoint xyz*

Than convert the loc-file into a ov2-file and save it on your SD-card.

Happy caching!

Lorenz

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 07:29:31 +0000

Thanks Jeff.

Yes, you have to beware of the hidden .txt extension and, come to think of it, I may have encountered a problem due to the hidden OS X ."_" files myself.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 07:16:08 +0000

By looking at my SD card using FileZ on the Palm, I discovered that Mac, when it copied the files over to the SD card, created two additional files: "._geocaching.ov2" and "._geocaching.bmp". I've run into this before and in other programs and the program wouldn't launch, instead, giving an error message. When I deleted the two rogue files, everything worked fine. Apparently, when there is a "._" file in addition to the valid data file, TomTom cannot see the good ov2 file and therefore, doesn't use or need the bmp logo file. I don't know why this didn't happen before when I did this the first time last month. I can't remember, but perhaps I did a hotsync as opposed to dragging to the SD card using the card reader. Also, even though it didn't show on my Mac as it viewed the SD card directory, the ov2 file was really a ov2.txt file. I had deleted the .txt, I thought, but apparently not. I did not get the Mac warning about using the txt or ov2 extension, as you described, until I made the extension change while viewing the file in "Get Info." Also, even though the .txt was not showing on the Mac, it was really there. On FileZ, I could see ".ov2...". That "..." clued me that something more was there. "Get Info" confirmed the txt.