Tile management

[HikinBikinGPSfan]

I've been playing with Topofusion demo and love how smoothly it works with the GPS, plus the track analysis features and the fact that it caches topos and images from the web. It works great for analysing GPS tracks after an outing and also for planing places to visit before you go if you are online. I've played with the GPS tracking features and trying it out on laptop when I'm out and about but each time find I don't have the tiles I thought I had loaded when I get to try it offline.

I'm curious if there is a map tile management tool planned or something already available??
-I'd love to zoom out to the "Zoomed out too far" level and see some red or green tiles that indicate I have tiles in those regions and down to what zoom levels if it can't get all topos.
-It would be great to box select a region, a set of waypoints in a GPS, or a track and have a macro run, even if it took all night, to just get all the zoomed in tiles in that area, near those points, or along that route... say all of So. Cal down to 2M since I live there, or a track along I-15 to Vegas at a lesser level?
-If this were to get too memory intensive, then the posiblility to delete areas from cache would also be cool... Say I flew to another town for a vacation and had loaded some maps around where I was staying but didn't need them after the trip?

Less impotant, but maybe someday
-The ability to sync some of the cached tile images from the lap top to a PDA or cell phone (handshaking with a companion program by someone else even) just before a hike would make for a killer app in my oppinon for those times where you were out on a planned trip with printed maps even, but conditions change at the place you thought you were going, you don't have internet acces but you have a laptop full of backup plans in your trunk?'>

[Krein]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback - it's much appreciated.

First - there is already a tool to load tiles in a boxed area.  It's the "reload / load maps tool" on the toolbar.

Make sure only the tilesets you want are activated/visible in options->preferences->tilesets, then draw a box.  It might take a while to get all 2M for SoCal - that's a lot of maps.  But 4M, or 16M might be possible.

I really like the idea of a "mode" within TF that shows you where you have maps downloaded.  I'll think about how to add this.  It would be nice to visually understand where you have maps and where you don't.  It does get kinda tricky with all the different types of maps and resolutions, though.

Right now you can't delete areas of the map from the cache, but this has become more possible in recent versions, due to consistent tile size.  It's an addition I'd like to see too.  

If you have a suggested app that TF might be able to export maps for, let us know.  I've been in the 'backup plan' mode, w/o internet access myself a few times, so I know what you mean.  Right now you can export a jpg with a worldfile that some software should be able to load and correctly georeference.

Thanks.

[HikinBikinGPSfan]

Thanks! I missed out on the boxing feature and overlooked that button on more than one occasion. I'll try that out and see if it works for maybe a smaller area and only one or two of the medium resolutions to see if I have better control of the maps.... like maybe one of our soon to be closed state parks and go visit ASAP! '>

On the indicators I was only thinking of the topos but, yeah, with the other images and combos you'd have even more "codes" and it might not be practical. Maybe it's not necessary but might prevent having to download a region agian if in doubt about a region. Let me play with it some more now that I know I can box select the maps!

For the PDA I've tried out various programs with no favorite available yet. I tried out an image viewer on my old Palm M505 but it crashes on a newer TX. Previously I had also tried Outdoor Navigator and really liked it. It had similar downloads of quadrants from the web like TF (wouldn't be synced), but when I went to purchase and register it had been discontinued for Palm. Recently I see the same programmer was working on his own version (activemap.com) but not ready if still in progress even. Been looking at Delorme or National Geographic, but then you are looking at another $$$$ non- Topofusion companion Desk application to sync with and proprietary map formats. I don't know.... still looking around.