GPS is so cool

In India, GPS receivers are still very rare and proper maps are rarer still. Even when available, the receivers are too expensive, so unless you really have a compelling need, you're unlikely to invest in one. So, though I've been reading about GPS for over 10 years now, I've never ever seen it in action. Until now.

Last week, during the Savandurga ride, I saw Rohan checking out his GPS receiver periodically. At the end of the trip, he had produced a map layered over a Google Earth image of exactly where we had been during the ride. I was suitably impressed and wanted to try it out for myself.

By sheer coincidence, my friend Shashi had bought a GPS receiver from China. It was a simple Bluetooth receiver that hooked up to any external device like a mobile phone or PDA. He's also just invested in an unlocked iPhone, but because its so badly locked down, he just couldn't get it to work with the receiver. So, he had resigned himself to just watching his stationary position on his laptop and was getting very frustrated about not being able to use it to the fullest potential.

In the past, I'd considered getting a GPS receiver for my Nokia N800. In many ways, it is an ideal navigation tool, with a large screen and adequate storage capacity. Maps were always going to be a problem, as the few solutions for India obviously didn't support the N800. At that time, I had thought that if someone could write a program that would use publicly available maps like Google maps or Yahoo maps, it would be very useful. I had not researched further, as I didn't have a GPS device to play with. However, now that Shashi had one available, I asked him lend his GPS receiver, and started googling for N800 GPS solutions. Very quickly, I came up with a program called Maemo-mapper.

Maemo-mapper is a mapper application that can interact with a GPS and plot the current position on a map. A lot of other applications can do this, however, the beauty is that it can access many publicly available maps like Google Maps, Google Satellite view, Yahoo maps etc. Amazingly, this was just what I had wished for a few months ago!!!

It is fairly simple in that it can only display your current position and route on a map. It cannot create driving directions automatically, this needs to happen in an external program and can be imported into this. It does, however, have the ability to export your location data as gpx files, which can be imported by any mapping program or a number of Google maps mashups and shared with others. This is a much more likely usage in the Indian context as driving directions are unlikely to ever
be reliable given the ever changing urban landscape.

I borrowed the GPS receiver for the weekend and took it with me everywhere. It was a lot of fun sitting in a car and watching it move on the map.