MapTrack

What is MapTrack Who can use MapTrack? How to install Quick overview Example maps and waypoints More about Maps Creating Maps Editing Vector Files Download map vector files via the internet Creating maps from scanned images Creating waypoint lookup tables Contact Details

What is MapTrack? MapTrack is a PalmOS application to generate and display vector based maps on the Palm screen. If you also have an NMEA enabled GPS connected, it will draw two crosshair lines to show your current position on the map. If you do not have a GPS connected, then you can manually enter your longitude and latitude coordinates to find your position on the map. The program is distributed with many examples of ready-to- use maps from all over the world. But the big advantage of this program is that you can easily make your own maps directly on the Palm, or you can prepare more detailed maps using a PC based application called MapMaker.exe (included in the price of MapTrack). Load as many maps as you like using the built in map database handler. Click anywhere on a map, you a popup shows the latitude and longitude of that point. Waypoints can also be easily added to any map using a special built- in waypoint lookup database. Waypoint lookup files can be edited or created on the Palm itself, or you can pre-generate the waypoint lookup list on a PC and download it to your Palm. Who can use MapTrack? It is quite obvious that MapTrack is incredibly useful as a navigational tool, but it has many other uses for example: · You can use it to locate the boundaries of a piece of real estate · a Fire-brigade or Sea Rescue unit can use it to immediately identify a location by manually entering its longitude and latitude. · A hiker can use it without a GPS to find his own coordinates by simply clicking on his approximate location on the map. How to install MapTrack After you unzipped into a temporary directory you will see a directory called install_files. Please install all the files in install_files directory. MapTrack.prc – This is the actual program which MUST be installed. NSBSystemLib.prc – This MUST be installed or the program will crash shortly after startup. Mathlib.prc – This MUST be installed if it is not already on your Palm device. Screenlib.prc – This MUST be installed if it is not already on your Palm device. North_America.pdb – This one is just an example map file to prevent that you are faced with a blank screen if no maps at all are installed. Strictly speaking it is not necessary to install this one if you also have any of the other example maps installed. I just included it in this directory to make the initial testing easier. The program also comes with many example maps and waypoint lookup tables. Installing them are optional, but I suggest that you install at least some of the example maps and waypoint files in order to evaluate the program. These files all have *.pdb extension. I also included some sample source text files that was used to create maps and waypoints. These files can only be used by MapMaker.exe, and it will not be possible to install them on your Palm. MapMaker.exe and MapTrack_userdoc.htm should not be installed on the Palm. They are files that should reside only on your PC. Quick Overview of the MapTrack Main Menu Load Map – You will see a list of all the maps loaded on the Palm. Choose any one to display a different map. See example maps and waypoints. If the map is loaded for the very first time, the load process is very slow because the map must first be created on the Palm. However, thereafter loads should be quite fast. Initialise Map – The very first time when you load a new map, it will automatically be initialized. Basically this means that the map is being created from vector data, and the process takes a couple of seconds depending on the size of the map. Thereafter when you load the same map again at a later stage, it is only loaded from memory instead of being recreated from vector data. This has the benefit that maps can be loaded very quickly and it retains any waypoints that you added. However, if you made any changes to the vector file of the map, then you have to manually initialise the map before the changes will become visible. Edit Vector Files – Choose this option if you want to create a new map on the Palm or edit the vector files of an existing map. Insert Waypoint – This will take you to a screen where you can view existing waypoint lookup sheets, and enter the coordinates for a new waypoint. See the section named adding waypoints to a map for more details Enter Location - Manually enter the latitude and longitude of any location and the crosshairs will automatically show you the position of that location on the map. You can also tap the screen anywhere with your stylus to get the coordinates of any point on the map. Show Location – This feature only applies if you have a GPS connected to the Palm. The program will automatically get your current coordinates from the GPS and the crosshairs will show your current location on the map. Distance Meas. – Use this to measure the distance and heading between two points on the map. To use the feature, click on two points immediately after choosing “Distance Meas” on the menu. A temporary dotted line will connect the two points and a popup will show the distance and heading between the two points. The distance measuring unit can be changed in the preferences view. You can choose to see results as meters, klimoters, feet, miles or nautical miles. Heading is always referenced to true north. GPS View – This feature only applies if you have a GPS connected to the Palm. It will display a screen that shows the latitude and longitude from the GPS as well as some other related data. Preferences – Lets you set up some preferences used by the program. Example Maps and waypoints I’m distributing the application with example maps for most of the continents and includes maps for North America, South America, Europe, Africa, UK, Asia and Australia. There are also maps dedicated to the USA and I included maps of most of coastal states like Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. The example maps are all for fairly large areas. Off course the idea is really that you download your own vector files for your area of interest and generate your own maps that contain all the details you require.. Once you get the hang of it, it is very easy to create your own maps. The program also comes with waypoint lookup tables for major cities from all over the world, as well as waypoint tables for the cities of every state in USA. Please note that I found these waypoints on the internet and that there may be some mistakes in them. Tip : If you can not find a city or town in any of the waypoint lookup tables, then I suggest you look it up at the following website and add it yourself. It has the most comprehensive searchable database for worldwide locations that I have ever come across. It is at: http://www.astro.com/cgi-bin/atlw3/aq.cgi?lang=e More about Maps MapTrack maps are created using vector files containing the longitude and latitude points of every single line that makes up the map. There is an excellent internet website where you can download such coastal and country border vectors for any location in the world free of charge at: http://oas.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/plsql/extractor.mapit This site has a Java map that lets you select the boundaries of your map and then create a vector file for only the region you selected. MapTrack was designed so that the vector files from this site can be easily converted to a map. All the example maps that accompany MapTrack were made using vector files that I downloaded from this site. You can create a map for an entire continent, or just as easily create a more detailed map for just small coastal region. Please read more in the section called Creating maps. Of course you can also use vector files from other sources to create your maps. Or you can even manually edit your vector file using a normal text editor on your PC. a Map do not necessarily have to contain so much detail in order to be useful. For example, imagine a map made up of only a single vector from the start to the end point of a planned boat trip. The map will be only straight line, but in MapTrack even this is useful because you will be able to determine how far you are off-course, and how far you still have to go to reach the endpoint. Creating Maps. There are two ways you can create maps for MapTrack namely : Creating maps directly on the Palm Creating maps using a PC Creating maps directly on a Palm To create a map directly on the Palm, you have to do the following steps: In MapTrack, select “Create/Edit Map” from the menu. Press the new symbol on the top bar or select “New” from menu. Type a name for the map. Press the Edit symbol or select “Edit” from the menu. The line "Longitude, Latitude" will automatically be entered in the first line. You will enter the coordinates of all the vectors that makes up the map, starting in the second line. Please refer to the section called “Editing Vector files” for more details about the format of the Vector Files and look at the example of a valid vector file. Press the save symbol or select “Save” from the menu. This will automatically start to create the map and open it in Map View if successful. Creating maps on a PC To create a map on a PC, you use the application called MapMaker.exe. Start the application on your PC and do the following steps : Start MapMaker.exe on the PC and select the vector source file. Select “Create Map” option. Click on the “Preferences” button and make sure all the preferences selected are correct. For vector files downloaded using the method described in downloading map vector files from the internet, the following settings are very important: · Delimiter = TAB char(9) · Sequence = Longitude/Latitude 4. Click on “Create Map” button. You will ask to specify a name and location for the Map file that you want to create. It is best to keep this name the same as your source file with only difference that the “.dat” is replaced by a “.pdb”. 5. The map will be created and you will see a preview of what it looks like on the Palm Screen. Upload the *.pdb map file to your Palm via Hotsync. It will immediately be available for usage in MapTrack. Editing Vector Files Keep the following in mind you edit your vector files: 1. Latitude and Longitude data can be specified as ddd.ddd, dd mm.mm or dd mm ss.ss. The program will automatically determine which input format you are using. The only thing is that you will have to follow a few simple rules, namely : · Always leave a space between the degrees, minutes and seconds parts · Always start the coordinate with either a "N", "S", "E", "W" letter to show North, South, East or West. · You may omit the "N", "S", "E", "W" letter, and instead use a "-" character to indicate West and South. If you do not enter the "-" character it will automatically assume either North or East (depending on whether you are busy entering Latitude or Longitude) · The "N", "S", "E", "W" letter can be in the beginning or the end of the string, for example N 12.23 or 12.23 N The following are examples of VALID input values : · N 12.3456 (will be detected as ddd.dddd input format) · 12 23.56 E (will be detected as dd mm.mm input format) · S 12 23 56.15 (will be detected as dd mm ss.ss input format) · -12.2345 (will be detected as ddd.dddd input format) Similarly the following are input values that are NOT VALID : · N 12.23 35 (The dd part should not have a fraction if there is also a mm part) · W -12.244 (You should use either "W" or just a sign. In this particular case the two even have conflicting values) · S 12.23 34.45 (If you use a fractional number for degrees it assumes ddd.dddd format and a minutes part are not allowed. · E 185 65 75.23 ( Degrees should be < 180, minutes < 60, seconds < 60) 2. Maptrack uses the default MAPGEN format which is lon,lat with new segments separated by a line containing the characters "# -b". However, you can also use a blank line to separate segments instead of the "# -b". If you entering a vector file directly on the Palm in MapTrack, then the data must be in the sequence lon,lat but when you are entering it on a PC via MapMaker.exe then it can also be lat/lon. (Just make sure you select the correct sequence in Options.). The following is an example of a vector file for a small piece of USA coastline that I downloaded from the internet. example of a valid vector file # -b -77.558207 25.026650 -77.382195 25.038384 # -b -78.109714 25.078280 -78.065124 25.068893 -78.049225 25.000000 # -b -78.313342 25.000000 -78.297460 25.097055 -78.306848 25.188581 -78.154303 25.207356 -78.109714 25.078280 The example above used a tab character (char(9)) as the delimiter between longitude and latitude. But you can use any of the following as a delimiter: Comma "," Semicolon ";" Colon ":" Space "char(20)" Tab "char(9) IMPORTANT : Make sure that you also specify the delimiter correctly in the Preferences menu. 2. The following example shows a simple vector file for a map to plot a straight line between LAX and JFK airports. Longitude,Latitude 118 24 W,33 57 N -73 47,N 40 38 In this example the first line is ignored because the first line of a vector file is always ignored and can contain anything. In the second line the W and N characters are the back instead of the front The third line demonstrates that you can also indicate W or S by using a “-“ sign. Downloading map vector files via the Internet. In my opinion, the best site on the internet where you can download coastal and country border vectors for any location in the world free of charge is at: http://oas.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/plsql/extractor.mapit and you can find the coordinates of any place in the world at :http://www.astro.com/cgi-bin/atlw3/aq.cgi?lang=e Use the Java map on the oas.ngdc.noaaa.gov site to select the boundaries of the map you want to create. Then choose the following options in order to make it compatible for MapTrack and MapMaker.exe : Coastline data base: Any one that suits your requirements. Compression method for extracted ASCII data: None GNU GZIP UNIX Compressed ZIP Coast Format options: Mapgen Arc/Info Ungenerate Matlab Splus Coast Preview options: No preview GMT Plot The *.dat file that you download from this site can be used without any modifications in MapMaker.exe. Do not worry too much about the fact that the vector file you downloaded is sometimes very large (1-3Mb). When MapMaker.exe generates the map for MapTrack, it is usually very small in comparison. I have also found that it is sometimes desirable to manually combine two or more downloaded files into one in order to create a good map. For example international borders, rivers and coastal outines are all downloaded as separate files. If you combine them all into a single text file (using any good text editor) then you can generate a much more detailed map. Check out the example of a valid vector file. Creating maps from scanned images MapMaker.exe and MapTrack does not directly import scanned map images, because it is impractical due to the limited display capabilities of a Palm screen. Instead they use vector files to generate maps which are far more usable. But it is possible to create vector files from scanned map images using a different program called GPSmapper, available at : http://home.imaginet.co.za/wildsoft/products/GPSmapper/ GPSmapper also has a companion program called GPSgrabber that allows you to capture GPS tracks and download them as vector files to your PC. You can then incorporate these captured vector files also in the maps that you generate using MapMaker.exe. Creating Waypoint lookup tables The advantage of using MapMaker.exe to create waypoint lookup files on your PC is that it is much faster and the content of the source file is automatically checked. When you create waypoint lookup tables directly in Maptrack on a Palm device, then there are no checks for mistakes in the source file. Creating a Waypoint lookup tables on a PC using MapMaker.exe 1. Use a text editor to create a waypoint text file in the correct waypoint format. Please check out the example of waypoint source file below. 2. Start MapMaker.exe on your PC 3. Select the waypoint source file created in step 1/ 4. Select the “Create Waypoints” option 5. Click the Preferences button and make sure that the appropriate preferences are selected. For the example below, the following preferences are important: · Delimiter = Comma (,) · Sequence = Latitude/Longitude 6. Click on “Create PDB” to create the waypoint lookup file. 7. Load the created PDB file on your Palm and use it in MapTrack. Example of waypoint source file NGZ;37.78;-122.32;Alameda NAS,CA S11;41.48;-120.53;Alturas,CA ACV;40.98;-124.10;Arcata,CA BFL;35.43;-119.05;Bakersfield,CA BAB;39.13;-121.45;Beale AFB,CA BUO;33.93;-116.95;Beaumont,CA BYS;35.28;-116.62;Bicycle Lk,CA L35;34.27;-116.68;Big Bear Apt,CA Adding Waypoints to a map This section describes how to use waypoint lookup tables. Check out how to create waypoint lookup tables here. You can add as many waypoints to a map as you like. A waypoint is just a means to identify a specific location (for example a city) on the map. Waypoints are displayed on a map as small triangle where the top corner of the triangle is indicates the position of the waypoint. The name of the waypoint will also appear next to it if specified. MapTrack has a built in system to assist with waypoint handling. Waypoint data are stored as lookup text files in the format described below. When you want to add a waypoint, then you first select which lookup file contains the waypoint coordinates. The contents of the lookup text file will be displayed in a scrollable field just below the file name. Search for the waypoint and highlight the waypoint data as explained in the example below. Now when you press the “Draw Waypoint” button the waypoint will be drawn on your map. You can edit an existing waypoint lookup table or create your own waypoint lookup table. Remember to save when you made changes to the waypoint lookup table, or else your changes will be lost. You can also delete a waypoint lookup table by selecting it and clicking “Delete”. Example of waypoint format The waypoint is saved in the waypoint lookup file as follows: <ShortName>, <Latitude>,<Longitude>,<LongName>,<Country> Example : LHR,51.500,-0.167,HEATHROW-LONDON,UK Only the <ShortName>,<Latitude>,<Longitude> are really used by MapTrack. The rest is only there for the sake of us humans to recognize it more easily. You are not required to type it in when you add a waypoint. In fact, you can even leave the <ShortName> out as well. Then the waypoint will be drawn as only a triangle with no name next to it. So for the above example, i) If you wanted to show the waypoint for Heathrow without any name, then I only highlight the following: 51.500,-0.167 and press copy. ii) If you wanted to show the letters LHR next to the waypoint, then select the following: LHR,51.500,-0.167 iii) If you selected the entire line like this : LHR,51.500,-0.167,HEATHROW-LONDON,UK Everything after the longitude (-0.167) is ignored, and the waypoint displayed is exactly the same as if you only selected “LHR,51.500,-0.167” as with example two. MapMaker.exe MapMaker.exe is a PC based program that can be used to generate maps and waypoint files for MapTrack. While it is certainly possible to generate the maps and waypoint lookup tables directly in MapTrack on the Palm, it is much more convenient and quick to do it on a PC. My suggestion is to use MapMaker.exe whenever the vector file contains more that 50 lines. To use the program is very simple and is discussed in more details in the section called creating maps on a PC and creating waypoint tables on a PC. NB : If you are getting error messages about missing components like comdlg32.ocx then it is because Visual Basic programs like MapMaker requires some extra files which is probably not on your computer. For this reason I created a special install wizard for MapMaker that will insure all the right files are installed on your computer. Please download it from the link below, unzip into some tempory directory and run the install.exe part. It will place all the correct dll files on your computer, so that you can run MapMaker.exe. In future you will be able to run MapMaker.exe updates without having to run this install wizard again. You can get the install wizard for MapMaker here: http://home.imaginet.co.za/wildsoft/downloads/mapmaker_install.zip Connecting a GPS to your Palm If you have a NMEA enabled serial GPS and the cables to connect it to your Palm, then it is possible to let the program track your current position by means of two crosshairs directly on the map. Important : Click on “Show Location” or press the hard down rocker button (usually located on the bottom center of the Palm) to start the GPS tracking loop. This loop will continue to run, but if as soon as you press any other key or tap anywhere on the screen, it will stop. You will have to restart the GPS tracking loop manually again. Many people do not know how to physically interface the GPS to a Palm. This is especially true for Palm devices that uses USB instead of a normal RS232 serial interface for Hotsync, because these Palm devices normally gets distributed only with USB cable. Most of these devices also have a normal serial interface, but you have to buy a special adapter cable in order to get access to it. Places to check for the cables: Ebay (there are normally tons of auctions for cables and such) http://www.markspace.com/datacord.html The above website has lots of information on using serial devices with various models of Palm OS devices. I have no affiliation (not even a customer), but am aware of the site and it provides information you may find useful. Registering MapTrack MapTrack is not unfortunately not freeware. You may test it out free of charge without any restrictions for 10 consecutive days, but after that you have to register the program in order to continue using it. It costs $20 US to register, and for this you get lifelong free updates of future versions of the program. To register, go to http://www.PalmGear.com or http:// www.handago.com/ and search for Maptrack. Then choose the buy option and you will be able to pay by credit card or other means for the software. Please send me an email to wt@imaginet.co.za immediately with the unique number that is shown on the registration screen of MapTrack on your Palm device. As soon as I received verification from PalmGear or Handago that you have indeed bought the program, I will generate a registration key and email it to you. You the have to enter the registration key on the appropriate field in MapTrack to make the program permanent. Other applications by the same developer http://home.imaginet.co.za/wildsoft/products/GPSmapper/ GPSmapper – a PC based application to generate vector files from scanned map images. GPS Acreage - Palm application to calculate acreage using a GPS GPScalc - Palm based Calculator to convert Geodic to UTM etc. NavCalc - Navigational Caculator to do distance and bearing etc. calculations Triangulator - A very simple way to do trigonometric calculations Birder - A Palm based program for bird watching enthusiasts AcroPDB.zip - A freeware windows program to create lookup tables for AcroFinder AcroFinder.zip - A freeware PalmOS program to search through lookup tables Contact Details If you have any questions or problems with this program, please contact the author, Werner Terreblanche at wt@imaginet.co.za