GPS application (was: Request for help: Would like community applications to show anddiscuss at LinuxWorld)

[Marcus Bauer]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 16:47 +0200, Tilman Baumann wrote:

> Well, i like tangoGPS very much. But it is hardly a comprehensive solution.
> First it's only a tile viewer for online maps. No routing, no offline 
> maps.

I'm a huge Openstreetmap fan but until OSM is ready for routing this
will take at least five more years, probably ten. 

For all practical purposes the tile pre-caching works well. And in some
hindsights tiles are far superior to vector data. Have a look at
maps-for-free terrain or openpistemap terrain maps: no chance to keep
all this data on a mobile device and no chance to generate maps on the
fly, not even with a quad-core desktop CPU.

Actually in most use cases the pre-caching mechanism will save plenty of
storage space.


> And if gpsd is so great, ever wondered why tangoGPS has a button to 
> restart and reconnect gpsd? 

Not because gpsd crashes but because it lets you connect to a different
gpsd elsewhere on the network, i.e. if you do realtime tracking of a
Neo. Or if you simply connect to the test gpsd on 82.240.156.91. Or if
you have tangoGPS running on your laptop and you quickly and without any
hassle want to use the gpsd on your Neo.

> And why i (gta01 user) have to launch gllin via tangoGPS?

Since month there is a script that lets you start gllin on the GTA01
automatically. I haven't used this button since a long time. There was
just on user (Bwalack) who convinced me to keep the button a bit longer.
And he paid for the lunch ;-)

> tangoGPS and OM2007.2 is hardly a comprehensive solution either.

Nope. Can't compete against a TomTom or any other commercial Navi. But
then there is no solution for the Neo: the screen is too small and the
speaker too weak. Nevertheless it is quite often quite handy.

> gypsy - yes
> gpsd - no (at least not as it is, maybe as compat interface)

gpsd works well and gypsy is not network capable. Simply using your
Neo's GPS from your Laptop does not work. And especially for an
application like tangoGPS it is inherently broken: every nav-application
wants to have the raw NMEA and not some preprocessed stuff and the
concept to only be notified for certain events is nonsense because any
nav-app wants to be notified about every data coming in. This concept
just sucks CPU time.

But just my 2c. ;-)