Gav's Blog

My friend Ajay has prompted me to create this post, and I’ll try to add to it over time as more cameras with inbuilt GPS. Why is inbuilt GPS important? Well it takes all the hassle out of geotagging photos. As you may have read in some of my previous posts, geotagged images are really useful for Emergency Management.

Whilst there are plenty of solutions available, I’m not going to provide the post-processing options here. I only want to record those that embed the co-ordinates at the time of taking the photo. No products that require post-processing are included.

Digital SLRs inbuilt GPS

• None yet, but maybe this year, there are rumours the Canon 60D may have inbuilt GPS.

Digital SLRs with Accessory

• Nikon D5000, D90, D300, D700, D3,D3X – requires  Nikon GP-1 accessory or a di-GPS
• Canon EOS 40D, EOS 50D, EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 1D Mark III, EOS 1Ds Mark III – requires Canon Wireless File Transmitter accessory (model is dependent on camera body). More info on Canon GPS, and manual page. It additionally requires a third party GPS as well that can provide position using the NMEA protocol.

Point and Shoots

• Nikon Coolpix P6000
• Ricoh 500SE
• Leica V-Lux 20 – as well as having inbuilt GPS, it also appears to have an inbuilt database of 500k points-of-interest that can be used to show nearby sightseeing opportunities (added: 2010-04-22)
• Sony DSC-HX5V Digital Camera

GPS Receivers with Camera

• Garmin Oregon 550, 550T

Mobile Phones with GPS

• Apple iPhone 3G, 3G S
• Nokia – a number of models that I’ll list in due course

Survey Quality solutions

• ikeGPS

Frankly, Nikon appear to have to produce a far smaller and lighter GPS solution for their cameras. Canon requires not only a bulky grip, but still requires a GPS to be added as well. The Nikon GP-1 or di-GPS look to be far more appropriate for field work for emergency management. Additionally, the Nikon solution can be used in conjunction with a battery grip, which allows additional batteries into camera (two, instead of the usual one). The Canon grip increases the bulk of the camera, but the camera itself cannot use a battery grip to extend the battery life in the field. Of course additional batteries can still be carried and swapped – although to replace the camera battery, the WFT must be removed. Finally, the WFT3/4 also require their own battery to operate.

As a Canon user, I am most disappointed with their solution to geotagging-at-shutter-click, and the Nikon approach appears far superier as it adds very little bulk to the camera, and doesn’t get in the way of using a battery grip to double the life of the camera without changing batteries.

This is a brief product announcement I provided to The Box, it was published on Tuesday the 2nd of June, 2009. It is archived here for my records.

Garmin announced their latest high-end hand-held outdoors GPS unit recently, and the headline feature is the inclusion of a 3.2MP camera with built in geotagging. This means that any photos taken with the unit will be instantly plot-able on maps, and will be a convenient tool for people enjoying the great outdoors and travelling. Other nice upgrades to the flagship Oregon line include support for a 3d electronic compass for accurate bearings when standing still; increased storage for waypoints, tracks, routes; capacity for a massive 5000 paperless geocaches; and fast USB 2.0 transfer when connecting to a computer at last.

Garmin Oregon 550 Product Page

This is a copy of an article I had published in The Box on Tuesday, the 26th of May 2009. This is a copy of my originally submitted text, an archive for my my records. It is a topic that has seen a bit of interest. I’ve also been interviewed on National Radio’s Panel on this topic. I will probably be writing a more detailed article about the problem in due course.

A recent report from the US Government Accountability Office has identified possible trouble ahead for the Global Positioning System (GPS). Due to governance failures of those responsible for the GPS, there is the risk that satellites may not be able to be replaced faster than the rate at which they fail over the next 10 years. Whilst replacement satellites have been ordered and developed, some technical and project management issues have delayed the launch schedule, with the next launch planned for November 2009. This doesn’t mean that the GPS will just stop working. There are currently 31 active satellites in the GPS constellation – only 24 are required for the agreed level of service. There are 13 satellites that are more than 12 years old, and are increasingly likely to fail. This happens as the solar panels age, and they produce less electricity to power the satellite. There are options for extending satellite life by turning off less critical secondary payloads that draw less power. A few satellites can fail without having a significant impact on end users. If the number of active satellites drops to 24 or below, GPS receivers will probably be less accurate as fewer satellites would be visible at any given time. Given the GPS is a strategic military asset for the US, it is highly unlikely it will be allowed to fail completely. This may drive innovation in GPS receivers to support multiple satellite navigation systems to reduce reliance on a single system.

I originally wrote this article for The Box, the Tuesday Technology section of The Press in Christchurch, New Zealand – it appeared on the 23rd September 2008. It also appeared on Stuff.co.nz.

Have you ever wanted to quickly find all the photos taken at your family bach? Chances are that unless you’ve been meticulous in filing your photos or tagging them with keywords, this could take quite a bit of time. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could click on your bach on a map, and bring up all of your photos within 1km, or display all of your holiday photos on a map? This is the promise of geotagging.

Simply put, geotagging records the latitude and longitude of the camera at the time the photo was taken and stores it in the image file.

Geotagging is not a new technology. It has been possible to geotag images for several years now, but previously only enthusiasts or professionals geotagged their photos, as it added extra steps to processing photos. It also required a GPS receiver that could record tracks – a breadcrumb trail of where the GPS had been. By matching the time in the GPS track log with the time that photos were taken, it is possible to reasonably estimate where the photo was taken. This took extra time and effort, and except for a dedicated few it was not worth the effort. The GPS receivers also added extra weight and bulk to carry around.

Recently GPS functionality has greatly shrunk in size and power demands, making it more friendly for the photographer by enabling the technology to be directly embedded in cameras and mobile phones.  Already a number of camera phones support geotagging photos – including much of the Nokia N series, and the recently released Apple iPhone 3G. Nikon has embedded a GPS receiver in their new Coolpix P6000 compact, and provide an optional GP-1 GPS attachment for recent Nikon digital SLR cameras. As more devices support geotagging, especially more affordable cameras and mobile phones, the possibilities (and the risks) are going to grow exponentially.

Combining GPS receivers with other devices makes the whole geotagging process transparent and automatic, and requires no effort from the user. This is going to rapidly open up opportunities for all sorts of geotagged data. But is it just technology for technologies sake? Not really, there are existing applications for geotagging, and even more to be come.

Travel photography just begs for geotagging. It is a great means of recording where holiday snapshots were taken, as you can easily show people where you took the photos. Not only that, but as people upload geotagged photos, they become a great travel planning tool as you can see photos that other have taken in a location that you are travelling to, and find sights nearby that you otherwise may have missed.

Real estate also stands to gain from geotagged photos – by being able to quickly load photos of properties for sale into an online searchable map, it will be easier to browse location and appearance at the same time. Councils and infrastructure companies have been using geotagged images for a number of years now to assist with managing assets – imagine being able to take a photo of a pothole and send the image to the council without having to try and explain where it is. Geotagging even has applications after a disaster – teams performing reconnaissance of an affected area can take geotagged photos whilst they are there, and when they return to an operations centre, the images and their exact location can be loaded into a mapping system to help authorities gain a better understanding of the extent of damage.

Location-based technology does come with inherent risks – mostly privacy related. Although many people are comfortable posting photos online, they may not be comfortable allowing people to determine the location where the photo was actually taken. This may be particularly relevant in the case of photos taken at home. No doubt we will see tools evolve to help people manage the privacy associated with geotagged photos, but in the meantime it is worth thinking about the content of a photo before uploading geotagged photos online.

The benefits of geotagging for the most outweigh the risks, and will likely lead to novel applications. The Apple iPhone 3G already has interesting applications taking advantage of geotagged images. Exposure provides mobile to Flickr – a photo sharing website. The ‘Near Me’ function will get your current GPS co-ordinates from the iPhone, and use that to display geotagged photos from Flickr that were taken near your current location. You can then view a photo, plot its location on a map, and if you desire, Google Maps will give you directions on how to get there.

Geotagged images don’t have to be shared online to reap the rewards – it may be that the biggest benefit is just providing another means of managing the vastly expanding data in your own photo library!

I’ve been meaning to blog about this sooner, but have been pretty busy with work. A chance email on a NZ GIS list that I belong to two weeks ago, inspired me to go out on a limb and see if I could get some Government data. I saw a post from someone within the Transit (soon to be merged into the New Zealand Transport Agency) refering to working with 2.2 million trackpoints from a roading survey. I started a private email discussion, and after a couple discussions, I soon had 2.2 million trackpoints from the 2008 High Speed Data Collection survey of New Zealand State Highway network.

My intention of obtaining this data was to be able to convert it to GPX files and upload it as a raw data survey layer to OpenStreetMap (OSM) so that it could be used as the basis for mapping New Zealand’s State Highway network in OSM.

I had some help from John McCombs from Integrated Mapping in Christchurch who very kindly reprojected all the points to WGS84. I then spent 4 evenings last week converting to GPX and uploading the files to OSM.

Was this data essential to mapping the highways in OSM? No. But it was a great experiment to see if a New Zealand Government Agency was willing to release data under acceptable terms and conditions – this dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons v3 Attritbution ShareAlike license, and effectively turn the raw data over for public consumption. Naturally, this doesn’t contain all of the detailed geometry that is collected during the survey, so not all of the data was made available, but we got the most important – latitude and longitude, and a lot of them!

For more information, see the following links.

• Transit High Speed Data Collection on gis.org.nz wiki
• Download the GPX on OpenStreetMap

One of the key points I was trying to make, was indicating that citizens are actually interested in accessing government data such as this, and that agencies should take a more proactive approach to releasing data for the world. After all, data is global these days – put it on the Internet and anyway can access it.

I find it hard to believe that the Institution of Professional Engineers in New Zealand is actually silly enough to promote the use of GPS technology to track vehicles and use that to institute user-pays billing on our roads. I have no problem with finding ways to deal with traffic congestion, and getting more people out of cars and into other forms of transport where possible and appropriate. But my problem is this.

The institution has released a report saying change is needed to the system where motorists pay for road use with a flat-rate excise tax. The report advocates the use of GPS systems to gather information on vehicle movements and charge accordingly. (from above linkie)

The privacy issues with GPS are a mile wide. To be able to implement congestion charging, which is often based on managing peak traffic at certain times, it is necessary to know exactly where a car is, and at what time – the basic information stored in a GPS tracklog. To be able to bill the driver, would this then mean that a GPS unit in a car is going to have to collect and send this information to some billing server that is able to process it, and analyse location and time, from which it will then produce the bill. Of course, this data would then likely have to be kept in case of any billing disputes – which means what is potentially very private and sensitive data is not going to disappear any time soon.

Of course, it may spur a whole lot of interest in DYI GPS jammers. In the meantime, you may want to check out a previous article I wrote on protecting your privacy with GPS tracklogs. GPS units produce private data, and the proposal from IPENZ is nothing more than a lame technical solution that shows a complete disregard for privacy.

Note – this has been written based only on news reports and not reading the IPENZ report in depth. Either it hasn’t been posted on their website yet, or it has only been made available to IPENZ members. I have emailed their media contact, but haven’t heard back yet.

The recent announcement of the second generation iPhone has a large number of people buzzing. The inclusion of Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities into the phone creates a very capable mobile computing platform that has a lot of potential for emergency management.

What features make it a potentially useful tool for emergency managers?

1. Large storage – 8-16GB. Plenty of room for photos, documents and other material in a slim and very portable device.
2. Excellent user interface. I’ve been using an iPod Touch (iPhone less the phone) for 9 months now and have to say it is the nicest user interface I’ve used yet on a small device. I find it truly painful to use my Treo 750v mobile phone in comparison.
3. Multi-method positioning. The upcoming iPhone will be able to use three different methods to locate the devices current position. First, and most accurately it will use the GPS. It will then fall back to wifi, listening for nearby wireless devices and looking these up from a georeferenced database over the Internet, If both of these fail, then the least accurate method of using the cell towers will be used.
4. Multi-channel communication. The device will not only be able to connect via mobile carriers, but it the previous version it has wifi – at the minimum it could be used to connect to a local wireless LAN and access a Sahana server disconnected from the Internet.

Sure, there are some negatives too – it is a fragile device not necessarily suited to hazardous environments, and it doesn’t have replaceable batteries. Everything has limitations though and if these are recognised and accommodated, one could still achieve benefits from its usage.

Apple has also released a Software Development Kit (SDK) and infrastructure to allow software developers to write applications to run on the iPhone. This creates opportunities for development of tools that can be deployed for emergency management on an iPhone.

One example – as the iPhone has a GPS, camera, and means of connecting to the Internet (wifi or mobile) – it wouldn’t be too hard to write an application that could be made available for free download to citizen’s iPhones. Then, anytime they see say damage on the streets surrounding their home or work, they could take a photo, fill out some quick optional comments on a form, and submit the georeferenced photo and comments over the Internet to a Sahana server and instantly have the image geolocated for the emergency managers use. And, if the phone can’t make a connection due to failure or congestion, then the images are queued for delivery once communications are restored.

However, recent news of the iPhone SDK suggests that such an application would be in breach of the license agreement. I’m not a developer, but Electronista provides the following text from the license agreement, Section 3.3.7

applications may not be designed or marketed for real time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes.

I don’t have a problem with most of these – but the broad definition of emergency may stop deployment of emergency management applications on the iPhone. This is understandable from a liability perspective, but I hope it doesn’t stop developers creating ground-breaking emergency management applications using the potential of the iPhone.

Speaking of which, location-aware applications for the iPhone2 are already being displayed. Two very interesting ones to pop up so far are Loopt and OmniFocus. Very cool possibilites are opening up. Loopt is a location-aware social networking tool that lets you see if any of your friends are nearby so you can hook up for a meal or coffee. OmniFocus for the iPhone introduces location aware task lists. Near the office? Your office tasks pop up. Need to go to the grocery store to get item on your grocery list? It will provide directions.

It is going to be an exciting time for location-based services!

Note – this is a living document and will be continually updated with more observations as I spend more time using the unit.

Introduction
For a couple of years now, I have been borrowing a friends Garmin 60csx for going geocaching with. My last GPS was a Garmin GPS Map 76S, and before that the venerable 12XL. With my use of the 60csx steadily increasing, my friend was seeing less and less of their GPS, so I finally decided after some reading to take the dive and purchase one of the new Garmin Colorado’s to become my primary GPS.

This article is my living review of the Garmin Colorado 300 that I purchased, and I’ll be continually updating the page as I find more likes and dislikes. Any additions after the first publication will have the date of addition in brackets. I’ll mark positive and negative points with the obvious +/-.

Summary
I had heard quite a few comments and discussions about the Colorado’s, and had the brief opportunity to try one out up in Hamilton recently thanks to RadioNut and ButterflyLady. I had been tossing up between trying a Colorado and getting a Nuvi for the car, but the need to stop hoggin my friends 60csx made the decision for me.

To date I haven’t regretted it. The benefits so far appear to outweigh the hassles, and I’m sure that there will be many improvements made to the software in due course. Haven’t yet cached with it, but it looks promising – although I don’t think it will replace the PDA notes functionality I use for recording multi-waypoint information and calculating final caches.

System Software History
* Initial Writing – Software Version 2.40, GPS Software Version 2.60

Casing and Connectivity
The new exterior to the unit is remarkably different. Most noticeable is the big shiny screen, the roller, and the silver finish.

+ In the hand – the unit fits in my hand much better than the 60csx and feels much more solid and durable.

+ Big screen – more real estate taken up by the screen is a good thing!

+ External antenna port – this is in a far better position than the 60csx, and is far less likely to come out during use. The problem I had with the 60csx was the rounded casing around the external antenna port caused the plug to come loose with just the slightest antenna cable movements. Initial tests in the car show this port to be far better designed.

+ Latch system – the new latch also looks a big improvement over the 60csx. Having previously attempt to carabena the 60csx to something using the metal ring on the back, I quick discovered that with a big of movement the latch would soon open the battery compartment and you’d end up with the GPS on the ground, and just the back lid still attached to you. Not good. The new latch appears to secure the back much better.

+ Mounting system – the new mounting system on the back also seems a big improvement. I haven’t got the bike mount set up yet, and the car mount hasn’t arrived, but it appears to have a very nice rile system to slide the unit snugly into mounts.

- Silver finish – sure it looks high tech and all, but I’m wondering how long it is going to remain in that pristine condition once it has been on a few geocache hunts with me.

- USB Storage mode – why oh why did Garmin decide to have the Colorado automatically switch to USB storage mode as soon as a USB cable is connected? The 60csx was fantastic in that you could power the unit in the car via USB. Now you plug it in with the same cable and the unit switches to USB storage mode. Even worse, because you can’t eject it, you have to remove the batteries to reset the unit to its ordinary operating mode. For sure, make the storage mode easy to access when connecting it to a computer, but don’t have it default to it. Perhaps pop up a brief window that gives the option of converting to USB storage mode, but if no input is given in a few seconds then the GPS should stay in the same state.

Configuration and Profiles
The Colorado can be a bit of a monster to configure at first glance. It introduces profiles for different activities that allow you to quickly change the setup of the GPS.

+ Profiles – it is great being able to customise the the GPS for different activities. The unit came with profiles for Recreational, Geocaching, Automotive, Marine and Fitness activities. Each profile allows full customisation of all settings of the unit. Even allowing different co-ordinate systems, or measurement systems to be defined.

+ XML Profiles – I haven’t had much more than a casual poke-around on the USB file system of the GPS yet, but it appears that the profiles are stored in XML. This means in theory that you may be able to create a global XML template, and then adjust them in a software editor or even a web page. This may be particularly useful for sharing profiles with mates, or for suppliers to create profiles, and then upload new profiles just by copying the XML profile files into the appropriate folder.

- No global profile – one problem with the very configurable XML Profiles is that there doesn’t appear to be a global profile. This means that if you want to change a setting in all profiles you have to either load and edit each profile individually in the GPS, or change it in each XML file. What would be really nice is being able to have a Global profile (XML, just like the rest) that defines settings, and then each profile is able to either overwrite a setting, or inherit the property from the Global profile. Likewise, if the profiles are able to inherit properties from the Global profile, then the XML profiles would be smaller and easier to edit as they would only have to record the settings that are different from the Global profile, rather than record every setting.

Interface and Input Methods
This has been perhaps the biggest learning curve yet, as the Colorado has a significantly different user interface and input methods.

Having come from the 12XL, 76S, and more recently the 60csx, I have become very accustomed to the ‘page’ style of navigation.

+ After a few days usage, the roller is very very nice for changing the map scale, and sure beats the continue – in, in, in or out, out, out on the 60′s.

- Shortcuts Menu – I’m not yet convinced this is the easiest way to navigate around the pages, and for the time being I have changed this to the more familiar ‘page’ navigation. This can be changed in System Setup Page > Shortcuts > Options > [ Use Shortcut Menu | Use Page Loops ]. This may be where profiles come in. If using a profile with only a few pages, it may be better to use Page Loops. If using a profile with a large number of pages, the Shortcut Menu is probably a far better option. At least with profiles, you’ll have the best choice.

- Navigation strangeness – When navigating to a waypoint, and using Shortcuts, the Stop Navigation function is found under the Shortcuts list. However, when using Page Loop, it is dynamically added to the top of the Other list. Strangely enough, neither of the two obvious pages that may be used for routing – Map or Active Route – provide a quick option to either Stop or Detour the current navigation. Detour doesn’t even appear in the Other list in Page Loop mode. For some reason, when you are navigation, and are set in Page Loop mode, a second Mark Waypoint is added to the Other list, so you end up with Stop Navigation, followed by two Mark Waypoints. Clearly a bug with handling these dynamic menus. As it is currently structured, the Shortcuts mode appears to be far more reliable and easier to access Stop Navigation.

- Profiles – it should be far, far easier to change profiles. Right now you have to head to either Setup or Other, select Change Profile and select the profile. Too hard for constant changing, particularly if you’re going from Automotive to Geocaching as you drive to a cache, hunt a cache, drive to the next cache etc. It should be possible to load profiles into the Shortcuts menu.

- White message pages – these have frankly become a little irritating. Having the whole screen revert to white to display an error message is annoying. Particularly when you are driving and navigating and you are not necessarily in the possible to dismiss the error. More subtle error messages should be implemented that allow you to continue to at least see the display of the GPS.

Function – Tracks
The tracklog is a mixed bag so far with the Colorado, and I haven’t yet quite got my head right around it. The setup is relatively simple and allows you to select Auto/Time/Distance as always.

One thing I loved about the 60csx – particularly for travel – was the way you could set it to record track points quite frequently, and have it save them to the card. Each day it would create a new tracklog file with the date as the filename – e.g. 20080508.gpx. This was great.

The Colorado setup is different. In particular is the way it handles Current vs Archive tracks. This of course may just be nomenclature in that the Current track is the same as the 10k active track on a 60csx, and the Archive tracks are the equivalent of those save to a card. However, instead of naming and filing the tracklog GPX files by date, the Colorado appears to be using a serial number e.g. 1.gpx, 2.gpx etc. It appears to create a new file at a certain size, rather a separate file for each day.

Function – Geocaching
The geocaching functionality on the Colorado certainly deserves a lot of discussion. Some aspects of it work very well, others leave a lot to be desired.

+ Geocaching GPX – the ability to store geocaching GPX in the unit and display cache information is quite useful. It provides nice quick access to difficulty, terrain, cache size, trackables, full description, hints and logs. This certainly brings the Colorado a long way towards true paperless geocaching.

+ Field Notes – these appear to work very well. After heading out for some geocaching where I found four, and DNF’ed another, I tested the upload of the field notes file. It worked flawlessly and provided me with an easy means of creating logs for each cache, and these were removed from the list as the caches were logged. The are loaded in the order they were logged in the field – making the logging of caches easier than ever before. I am certainly going to make good use of this function. Of course, given that field notes are nothing more than a text file, it could also be crafted on a PDA in the field and uploaded. But the Colorado certainly makes it painless.

- Geocaching GPX for multis and puzzles – the geocaching GPX is fantastic for simple geocaches such as traditionals and letterboxes. However, it does fall down when multicaches are concerned. Multis still required something to record details and solve to find the final cache. Coming from a PDA, I still found myself reaching for the PDA to complete the multi-caches today.

- Geocache waypoints – Unfortunately the geocaching functionality does not recognise multicache waypoints, or carparks and the like. Instead of finding them under the Geocache page, you have to return to the Where To? page, and go to waypoints and then try and find the waypoint. The Colorado really should be smart enough to match the 3rd-6th/7th characters of a waypoint name so that it can match it to a geocache, and then display these child waypoints under the Options menu with a nice quick Go To Child Waypoints page or similar.

- Routing – it is quite cumbersome to  select road routing to drive to a cache, and then revert to geocaching mode to find the cache. All navigation in the built in geocaching mode is point-to-point. The Geocaching profile really needs an additional option when selecting Go To Location – it should ask whether you would like to route or go direct. I found it quite frustrating today to switch back and forwards between modes today so that one could route from cache to cache in the car.

- Cache identification – it would be nice on the Geocache page if the type of each geocache was identified with a little icon. It would help when deciding what cache to do next to see whether it is a traditional, multi or puzzle.

The Geocaching functionality has a lot of potential, but it is still in a relatively immature state. The capabilities are huge step up from the 60csx in terms of complexity, however the ease of use and thought about the interface doesn’t look that refined.

Function – Automotive
Wow – used the Automotive profile today and was very impressed by the map. A nice oblique view looking down from behind to show the streets ahead. Upcoming streets a nicely labelled. I’m really looking forward to getting the car mount now and using it. It looks very nice.

Function – Satellite
It is a simple page, but one I refer to quite often to check the signal. Whilst the display of information is very nice, I feel that it has a few improvements that could be made.

- Signal Strength Bars – the dark blue signal strength bars are very difficult to see against the default dark green background. Please provide a higher colour contrast setting so that you can actual see the signal strength bars at a quick glance.

- Unknown Number – there is a little number down the bottom right of the constellation map, but it is not identified. I assume it is the elevation. Please mark it as such.

Function – Map
What can I say other than the new map looks absolutely fantastic. Most of these comments are based on the NZ Open GPS Maps and the Global DEM.

+ Global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) – the inclusion of a global DEM means that even New Zealand to some degree gets the pretty shaded relief map imagery when zoomed out. Note that this is not the 3D view, and that requires additional information to be added to the maps to support that.

+ Resolution and Screen Size – the combination of increased screen size and increased resolution have created a gorgeous and practical display. Practical as you can display more detail on the map by using smaller cartography.

+ Tracklog Mapping – the mapping of tracklogs is far less intrusive than it used to be. A nice thin black line that doesn’t obscure the actual roads is a big improvement. It even allows you to see more detail in you tracklog, such as the line around roundabouts. Very nice.

+ Options – the map options are very simple and easy to use. It is simple to select maps and enable/disable them with just a few simple clicks. Likewise adding and removing data fields are quick and easy. Modifying data fields couldn’t be much easier either.

- Only Two Data Fields – with the increase in map size, it might be nice to have say four data fields on occasion, but the options didn’t appear to allow anything other than the default two.

Function – Compass
I haven’t really used the compass yet, so more comments will come.

- Easy On/Off – it seem really strange that to turn the compass on and off, you can’t do this from Compass Page > Options, rather Setup > Heading > Compass > [ Off | Auto ]. You should be able to quick toggle this from the Compass page options.

Function – Project Waypoint
This is a really bad example of user interface design. I can’t believe that to enter the bearing, you have to enter each digit of the degree. How slow, painful and indicative of someone that hasn’t really thought about the design. They should use a different graphic to indicate a compass, and have fast turns translate to +/- 10 or 15 degree increments, and have slow turns refine the bearing by individual degrees. Far quicker entry than the tortuous system they have now.

Recommended Improvements
These are listed in no particular order, and are a brief summary of what is contained in the review above. I’m sure some of these we will see in time with software upgrades – assuming that Garmin just wanted to get the Colorado’s to market, and then continue adding/refining features to an existing userbase.

* Create a global profile, and allow custom profiles to inherit or override properties from the global profile. This will make profile management quite a bit easier.
* High contrast signal strength bars on the Satellite Page.
* Identify the mystery number of the Satellite Page.
* Allow the display of more data fields on the map display e.g. default is two, allow say four, or even six.
* Provide a quick Compass Off/Auto option on the Compass Page.
* Provide a different user interface for selecting degrees on the Project Waypoint page. There is absolutely no reason to enter each digit individually for a bearing.
* It would be nice on either the Satellite or Map pages to have an option to quickly turn the Tracklog on/off.
* Make it easier to access the Stop Navigation/Detour modes when in Page Loop mode. In fact, why not just put these under the Options menu for both the Map and Active Route pages – as these are the most commonly used pages for routing.
* Profiles should be able to be added to the shortcuts menu to speed switching e.g. I’d like to be able to quickly select Automotive and Geocaching profiles with as few button presses as usual.
* Geocaches page needs to identify different cache type at a glance.
* The Geocaching function needs a much easier means of integrating routing for driving between caches, and then switching to cache hunting.
* Stop the unit switching to USB mode when a USB cable is plugged in.  Why can’t it work just like the 60csx? USB should power it by default, and perhaps the USB mode could be selected from the Shortcuts instead
* Get rid of the full white page error messages.

Just wanted to add some brief comments following discussion as GOVIS 2008, in the ‘Our Place in Space’ stream. This was held in Wellington last Friday. At the end of the day I raised the following challenging comments to the audience, and they seemed to be well received. I will be reviewing and adding to these in the near future.

1. Don’t wait for application ideas or business cases. Free as much data as possible and the applications will follow. The killer application for your data has not been invented yet.

2. Consider community and volunteers. We are enthusiastic, have a huge capacity to learn, we have a hunger for data, and if it suits us we will dedicate massive amounts of time to it. Our expectations are being fed by online mapping and we want more.

3. Spatial citizens don’t care about arbitrary political boundaries and are happy acting with national and even international datasets. We don’t want to work with 80+ Local Government agencies. We want it to be trivial to find spatial information. Let us integrate the data we want using our own systems. We want to package the data our way. We want to take it out into the real world where there is no web access. We want to fix your data, but only if it is fixed once and fixed fast. LINZ – are you listening? We can do it in 24 hours and we’re not getting paid to do it. We will only get faster, more competent, and hungrier for information about our place in space…

As part of the GOVIS Geospatial miniConference, a maps mashup is being held the day before with data sets being provided by LINZ and others. More information will be made available on the barcamp page (for more on what a barcamp is – click here).

A challenge to innovate! A challenge to find open data! Create and present your mash-up with a few data sets provided for the BarCamp! Cool Prizes! Sponsored by Statistics New Zealand, The New Zealand Geospatial Office and the Spatial Sciences Institute. Entry is open to everybody who is enthusiastic about using New Zealand’s core geospatial data in presenting current issues and analysis challenges! MashUp 2008 is an event which brings together New Zealand’s leading technical experts, as well as budding enthusiasts, in combining information sources with mapping boundaries and data in innovative ways. Rules of the competition will be downloadable here as soon as possible.