Mac OS X Leopard and Mapsource and City Navigator

I'm still here in the background. I haven't had time to try looking at
this rat's nest. I really want a shrink wrapped native Mac product,
and it seems no one has one yet. Maybe iPhone version 2! We can only
hope! Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google is now on Apple's board of
directors, and they know a LOT about maps and GPS.

I have a Garmin Etrex Legend Cx, Mapsource on the PC I am turning into
a boat anchor (not that it hasn't been since the day I bought it),
and City Navigator. I'll throw it all away for the first vendor to
deliver a good native Mac implementation for a handheld GPS, hardware
and software.

why a cellphone can't offer everything Garmin offers on my Legend,
including software. Google Earth already reads GPS coordinates from
my Legend so I can wait for such a device for up to two years before
I need to purchase anything else from Garmin or otherwise. So let's
see who wins. Personally, I think Apple and Google will eat GPS device
manufacturer's lunch (among others). Say a next generation iPhone with
an Open Software plug in application that runs under their new software
tool kit due next year to standardize cell phones (to the dismay of the
phone companies that currently disable many features on the phones they
sell so they can maximize their profits). You go Google!!!

John
I drop suggestions into Google's suggestion box occasionally. Note
that Google employees are not only hired for their top notch ability,
but get one day a week to work on any project they please. What a
brilliant way to achieve rapid innovation!

i asked them at last years macworld and they said 'it was harder than
we thought.' in less than two months, it will have been two full years
since their first time at macworld with very little to show for it.
even a small company with far less resources than garmin has could have
written a mapsource equivalent in all of that time.


he is correct. it is not the case (other than running windows on a
mac).

there are two parts to the current garmin mac utility. the first part
is an application that runs on windows that lists all of the installed
maps, verfies the unlock codes as valid (if applicable) and then copies
(and gzips) the selected maps to wherever the user specifies. it is
also very picky about the maps being unlocked and i actually had to do
a clean install of them because for some reason, it refused to believe
that they were unlocked.

once the map file is on the mac, it is unzipped and then opened with
the garmin map manager utility, which simply copies the map files to
the application support folder so the downloader can find them (and
this is a step that anyone could do manually). since i used a shared
folder between the two machines, there was no reason at all to gzip it
and then unzip it moments later, but there was no way to disable that
step.

the map installer is NOT mapsource in any way shape or form. it is, as
its name suggests, a tool to install maps. that's it. it doesn't do
anything else, and in fact, it doesn't really do much of anything at
all if a gps is not connected -- if it doesn't see one, the only option
is quit. if it does see a gps, a map selection window appears, and
then the desired maps can be selected and downloaded. and to think
this sophisticated tool took 18 months from their first announcement of
supporting macs.

prior to this tool, the only way to download maps on a mac was to run
the windows version of mapsource somehow. on an intel mac that works
quite well since both vmware fusion and parallels desktop support usb.
however, on an older powerpc mac, virtual pc was the only option and
usb did not work with garmin gps units, so a usb-serial adapter was
required, and needless to say, downloading maps was very time
consuming.

for copying track logs, waypoints and routes, either to or from the
gps, there is a third party utility called load my tracks and it can
communicate with a number of gps units, including garmin:
there are also other shareware/freeware options that support gamrin
(and other) gps units.

hope that helps!

nospam wrote:

It sounds like they need outside management consultants to help them
hire a top notch Mac lead programmer and form a team with motivation
from the top to get over this. They seem to be thinking "inside the box"
with existing (incomplete) internal resources and need an outside,
objective, perspective. As it stands, they've been sitting ducks for
two years (at least) waiting to be someone's lunch. Mmmm, duck! Is that
new GPS device a G(oogle)Phone, an iPhone, or ... Whatever it is, it
will synchronize with my Mac.

John

nospam wrote:



You bet it does! Thank you very much.

So I guess the bottom line is that once the maps are migrated from a PC
and on the Mac, there is no "Garmin map application" that can display or
use the map files in any form.

If that's right, I'm sort of wondering why anyone would want to go to
all the trouble of migrating the map files. I guess it is something to

Jack

it can display the maps along with a pan and zoom control, and it shows
the boundary boxes of the various map regions so they can be selected.
it is sort of a 'mapsource lite' with a lot of emphasis on 'lite.'


in my case, i have a powerpc powerbook and loading maps when i travel
is a royal pain because serial communication is my only option. on a
recent road trip, i let it run overnight while i slept, and the gps was
ready to go with updated maps when i woke up. with this utility, i can
download maps via usb in substantially less time. on the other hand, i
don't do long road trips very often, so i rarely change the maps that
are installed.

however, with intel macs, the benefit is less because mapsource can run
under windows with full usb support rather than being stuck with serial
only. however, it does require buying vmware fusion or parallels
desktop and a copy of windows. that's not a big deal if someone wants
to run a few windows applications, but if mapsource is the only windows
application they need, it is a lot more expensive than simply using the
garmin utility.