Forum: General Topics
Forums / General Topics / tmj organizer and googlemaps
| Subject: | tmj organizer and googlemaps | |
mizu 19:34 | Hi, it will be possible that the organizer will work with googlemaps same as with openstreetmap? It'll be great because osm is not enough detailed for me. Or maybe another soulution if we could create tmj file from titled pcs insted of loading a big file which is then splitted again. There is no problem to download small titled pictures. Thanks for reply | |
Stephen 9:41 Location: Phone Model: | Hello, Unfortunately the Google Maps terms & conditions prohibit the map tiles from being downloaded directly into third-party programs, therefore I can't add this into the Map Organiser I'm afraid. However, its possible to manually take screenshots of Google maps and then stitch these together in Photoshop etc, for importing into the Map Organiser. (It needs to be done in one large tile rather than many small ones since it has to apply a Mercator-Rectangular Projection correction, which would get very messy with lots of small tiles!) Regards, Stephen | |
johanande 6:17 | Hi, There is a similar program called trekbuddy. Trekbuddy is using picture tiles and a .map file for calibration. It is also possible to put all tiles into a .tar archive. I saw that you have a header that seems to contain the same info as the .map file. Anyhow, to trekbuddy there are third party programs that create map tiles from google maps. Maybe those maps could be converted to tmj format. While writing this I just realized that this will probably fail due to different projections. Please correct me if I'm wrong. //Johan | |
mizu 8:23 | Hi guys, thanks for reply. to stephen: How would you stich the images in photoshop together? I can't imagine that:) You have six thousands pcs of map so how to do it? There exist lots of 3rd programs which can download the maps from google, but only in two ways. First is that you can download map tiled into small images, but there is, unfortunatelly, no way how to join it in map organizer. You can only load one map image. And that's the proble 'cos these softwares are able to download google map into one "big" image, but big is not really big. Because there is problem with memory. So the max size of image is app. 20 mega wich coresspond to app. 8000 pcs size 240x240. So if you can take detailed map (zoom 18 and higer) and want to take bigger area, you have no chance. to johanede: yes, I know trekbuddy and there is no problem with big detailed map creation because it uses titled images which are tarred into one. But, unfortunatelly, it has moore moore less usability than tmj which is great. To be honest, it is only a map. Could you guys advice something what I can create a really big tmj map with?? thanks | |
Stephen 11:37 Location: Phone Model: | Hi Mizu, I'm not saying its not fiddly!! But here is one way that I've used in the past... The trick is to set your monitors screen resolution as high as possible. On my system (with an ATi graphics card) if I set a resolution higher than the monitor can handle, then it displays a smaller section of the whole view on the monitor, which automatically scrolls around when the mouse reaches the edges of the screen. So I'm able to set the resolution to 2048x1536 pixels. If you then fire up Google maps, or Microsoft Local, etc, hide the Internet Explorer toolbars and make it run fullscreen (press F11), then you can capture a pretty large map in one go - press the Print Screen key, then paste the clipboard into Photoshop (I actually prefer Paint Shop Pro for this). Crop the edges of the image, then by repeating this a few times (scrolling the map each time) you can fairly quickly stitch the images together. You then just need to figure out what the lat/long extents of the map are. Admittedly, if you're after a 20000x20000 pixel map then this might take quite a time, but 4000x4000 should be fairly doable. Regarding Trekbuddy, this is pretty cool, especially its ability to handle different datums/projections - Johan, yes you're correct that this is the problem with using standard Google tiles in TMJ. I've specifically limited it to the single rectangular projection for speed reasons. The maths required to plot a 1000-point track onto even a Mercator map would probably cripple the average phone as it needs to translate and display every point at least once per second. (Admittedly there would probably be various optimisations that could help this, but its still quite difficult). With the rectangular projection the maths is kept to a minimum, allowing a lot more information to be plotted onto the map. Cheers, Stephen | |
diego 9:01 | Regarding using google maps, I must say that I have been using 'moble gmaps' on my phone for a while now, both using live map download and also downloading maps to pc and then uploading them to phone for offline use. No problems. And it is not only that google coverage is complete, and have various sets (photo, roads, terrain) available, but it also provides turn by turn guidance (directions) from inside the java application. Although its author says that google keeps changing the format, and that makes difficult to get the most of it... So I do not understand what the problem is in using a similar approach with tmj. For all the rest, the tmj screens and tracking utilities are just wonderful. | |
ChrisM 13:37 Location: Phone Model: | I haven't read all of this thread in detail, but it seems that amongst other things, you are looking at a way of stitching multiple parts of maps together to get one large map file. I've come across this: http://users.skynet.be/hofinger/MapCapt.html You have to pay ($10) to get the full version, but the demo version joined 2 screens from the OS Get-A-Map website seamlessly as far as I could tell... I saves the file as a BMP which is a bit big, but I've converted it to a TIFF file before importing into TMJ Map Converter, and it all seemed to work! Chris. | |
Stephen 16:40 Location: Phone Model: | The use of Google maps comes down to a legal issue rather than a technical one. I could easily add in support for Google Maps in the Map Organiser (in fact I've already got it working in a private version), but if I then distribute this I'd be risking breaking the Google licensing terms. As far as I know they've already stopped MGMaps from using their maps - the problem is that the map suppliers have to protect their interests. (Incidentally, Navteq and Teleatlas have recently been bought by Nokia and TomTom for around $8billion and $2billion respectively - show its a pretty big market!!) This is what makes OpenStreetMap so good - the map data is completely free to use, in the same way as Wikipedia. It also has the potential to be much better as well - the detail in many large cities is already better than Google. I accept that its not much good if your own area doesn't have much detail, but its pretty easy to edit the map - you can even use the log files generated by TMJ to aid with this, and I'm looking into including more OSM-specific features in the future. If everyone just did a little bit, then it would soon become pretty complete! Chris, that utility looks pretty useful - its obviously designed to automate exactly what I've been doing manually, and I don't see how any of the map licensing issues can affect it, as long as people dont then distribute the maps they create privately. Brilliant! Cheers, Stephen | |
diego 11:47 | Yes, I testify that you cannot get google maps live from Mobile GMpas anymore, but you can still get them for offline use by accessing: http://www.mapcacher.com/ to select the target maps, and then grab them using a tool like gMapMaker. The resulting files can be uploaded to the phone and force MGM to use its cache only. This is the way I go now to enjoy high fidelity road and terrain google maps. | |
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