Thorsten Lemke's GraphicConverter is the Swiss Army Knife of image editors, and starting with v6.2 uses the Geotag Icon to clearly highlight geotag-related menu options for showing/ setting positions via Google Earth, editing GPS coordinate values, and geotagging photos via GPX files. iTrail, a track logging app for iPhone, now sports new tab bar and padlock icons I contributed to developer Justin Davis (preview). I was impressed by the extent to which the iPhone SDK manipulates white outline shapes with transparency that result in the inactive grey/ active blue icon states that you see.
Author archive for Bruce
Geotagging photos can be done manually or automatically. When using a GPS data logger in automatic mode your position at each point in time (intervals vary) is recorded as a track point. The collection of track points recorded during a logging session is called a track log. Some devices (e.g. GlobalSat DG-100, Holux M-241) feature a button for manual entry of a specific GPS location as a waypoint, which you can match to the corresponding photo(s) by hand. That all sounds pretty straight forward doesn't it? Well it's not, because some GPS devices can't tell their waypoints from their track points. Thankfully the aptly-named GPSBabel can translate us a way out of this misunderstanding for the DG-100, and an update to BT747 means you can now download waypoints from the M-241 to your Mac.
Continue reading 'Know your waypoints from your track points'
Fire Eagle is a free service from Yahoo! that provides a conduit for updating a centrally-stored current location, permitting delivery of location-aware services by means of an API allowing developers to resolve and share user location across various applications. Care has been taken to address privacy concerns by keeping choice in the hands of users, who can update their location manually or automatically from "anywhere". For example, Fire Updater on your MacBook might put you in a London hotel, while subsequent telemetry from SearchQuest GPS on iPhone tells your mates which pub to find you at; a least one WordPress plug-in is in development.
Are New Zealanders, the People on the Edge of the World, about to tip off the edge and into cultural homogeneity with the United States? I was surprised to read in The New Zealand Herald that the a new edition of the Lonely Planet travel guide is advising visitors to leave a tip of about 10% for good service. Tipping was not part of the culture when I was growing up, and nor was it an overt practice during my last stint at home during 2006–2007. It would be unfortunate if visitors to Godzone came with the expectation that they had to pay over and above the advertized price.
Continue reading 'New Zealand tipping over the edge?'
RouteBuddy is an application for Mac marketed as "iTunes for your GPS" in reflection of some interface similarities. It works with most GPS receivers to plot your live position on high-quality street maps, but can also import and export saved data to/ from some devices, applications, and online services. With full-featured and highly portable personal navigation devices increasingly affordable (e.g. TomTom, Garmin) and free tools available for direction-finding and location-sharing (e.g. Google Maps, Google Earth), you may be forgiven for wondering what gap in the market RouteBuddy aims to fill. This question set the brief for my review as I determined to assess its strengths and weakness against the tools you may use already.
Continue reading 'Get your GPS fix with RouteBuddy 2.2'
WordPress 2.6 introduced post revisions, a form of version control that allows you to review or revert to previous editions of a post or page on your WordPress blog. The value of this feature has generated some debate, largely because it's "on by default" with no easy toggle to disable it. The thing is notification of post revisions is private, within the admin interface. So how do you make the date of last editing public?
Continue reading 'Publicizing WordPress post revisions'
