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Archived - Feedback and Comments / Where do USGS topo tiles come from?

« on: March 24, 2006, 10:47:13 AM »

Hi,

I'm a long time user of TF and I love it!

I'm also a software writer and was thinking of integrating some USGS topo map tiles into an app I'm writing.  I can't track down where on the Internet you're downloading the indivdiual tiles from in realtime.  Where is this magical web service?

Thanks!

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Archived Support / Compliment; question: google maps support?

« on: June 05, 2005, 09:34:36 PM »

Hi!

First I want to give the authors of TopoFusion my most hearty congratulations for one of the finest pieces of software I've used in quite some time.  I've owned a Garmin Etrex Vista (with altimeter) for about 2 or 3 years, and use it for all my hobbies: mounted on my bike, during hikes, walking around cities, on hunts for a dozen geocaches, when flying my 4-seat Cessna, and sometimes watching out the window of a commercial jet on a coast-to-coast flight.  All that time, my Garmin was silently collecting track logs that I had never once viewed.

Last week I had my GPS on my bike during a 20-mile ride around an island, and the bicycle-rental guy asked if he could have the data.  I was afraid to say yes since I had no idea how to access the data -- tools I'd tried in the past would just draw a track on a white page.  After a long and arduous search I finally found TopoFusion which claimed to overlay the track on a map.  So I decided to give it a try.

Let me tell you: when I started downloading the data and all the 12,000 track points I'd accumulated over the years started whizzing by on the screen, it was the most amazing thing.  I was reliving the past 3 years of my life at warp speed!  Bike rides I'd long forgotten zoomed past in great detail.  All the fun of past geocache finds and hikes with my girlfriend came back to me as they were animated right before my eyes.  Topo maps would show me at an airport taxiing around, then ZOOM right down center of the runway and shoot into the wild blue yonder!  It was one of the most amazing 5 minutes covering 3 years, a dozen different states, and countless trips -- let me tell you, it nearly brought tears to my eyes.  That's not something I can say about much software.

Needless to say I paid $40 for the full version immediately, and generated some beautiful maps of the San Juan Islands, along with elevation data that the bike shop can hopefully use to draw a more accurate map to give to riders!  (We'd been surprised by some big hills that were not on the map they gave us.)

Now on to my question: is there any possibility of adding a feature to overlay tracks over the NAVTEQ maps from Google Maps?  Google Maps data is, in some ways, superior to the USGS data -- it's clearer, more up to date, and has more detail of roads.  (On the other hand, it does not have topograhic data such as mountains, lakes, etc.)  But, I think it would be a great alternative to the USGS data, and the Google Maps API probably lends itself easily to TopoFusion, since it allows fast downloading of individual sectors at various resolutions (unlike, say, MapQuest.)  Are there any plans to integrate TopoFusion with Google Maps data?

I'm a software developer; is the source available for TopoFusion if I want to add this feature myself and contribute it back?

Thanks again for a simply wonderful piece of software.