Messages

1

TopoFusion Pro / "Search for address" is dead again?

« on: July 28, 2016, 08:33:03 PM »

I have not been able to search by address or city the last few days. I upgraded today to v. 5.30, but still not working.

2

TopoFusion Pro / Live tracking w/Garmin Nuvi

« on: March 11, 2016, 12:54:53 PM »

After all these years of using TF, I finally decided to try using the live tracking feature. I'm running TF v. 5.13. The program is fine with talking to the Nuvi for "GPS transfer". But it gives "Error initializing COM port, check for other programs using port" when I try to start live tracking. Why would the COM port be OK for data transfer (both send and receive) in the one application but not the other? Does it have something to do with automatic data transfer vs. manual? Is the problem most likely with my TF version or COM port configuration or firmware on the GPS? I really need to get this working for some storm chasing applications.

3

TopoFusion Pro / Search feature

« on: September 23, 2015, 02:00:20 PM »

Lately I've noticed that the "Search city" feature is not working for me. I have upgraded to v. 5.11, but still get a response of "No matches found". Is anyone else having trouble with this? I would guess it's probably an issue with server for the Mapquest "nominatim service", right? I have tried on multiple machines and different internet access, but same response.

4

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Waypoint elevations

« on: October 15, 2014, 09:34:35 AM »

I did manage to convert waypoints to track point by using gpsbabel. But it would be easier not to have to leave TF. Maybe someday it would even be possible to access gpsbabel functions from within TF?

5

TopoFusion Pro / Waypoint elevations

« on: October 14, 2014, 10:53:33 AM »

I thought I had done this before, but maybe not. What I want is to use the DEM data to correct elevations of waypoints. Whenever I do "Correct elevations from DEM" on a file, it is only changing the track point elevations. I would also be satisfied to be able to convert the waypoints to track points and then do the elevations correction, but can't see a way to do that either (other than maybe writing a script outside TF to operate on the gpx file). Am I missing something here? The particular waypoints that I'm concerned with are ones that were created in TF using the Lap Analysis tool, which assigned elevations at waypoints only by linear interpolation between the track points (not good when they're far apart).

6

Feature Requests / Geodata from Iceland

« on: February 12, 2013, 10:39:03 AM »

Just heard of Iceland making all geodata available for free: http://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/free-geo-information-from-national-land-survey-of-iceland/

I didn't read through and (unfortunately) don't have any reason to be looking at Iceland right now. But maybe it would be of use to someone to have in Topofusion.

7

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Run-time error "non-modal form" crash

« on: February 07, 2013, 11:42:27 PM »

I'm running 4.67.

8

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Run-time error "non-modal form" crash

« on: February 05, 2013, 11:35:49 AM »

Today I am not getting the error. I did a scan/remove for malware and rebooted. Only other difference is that I'm on a different internet connection right now. I didn't look through last night's scan results, assumed it was just the usual spyware. But I wonder if there was something interfering with execution of TF somehow. By the way, I think I'm using v.4.68.

9

TopoFusion Pro / Run-time error "non-modal form" crash

« on: February 04, 2013, 11:32:21 PM »

Tonight TF has started crashing when I try to save a new gpx file. The message is "Run-time error '401': Can't show non-modal form when modal form is displayed." I have no idea what this is talking about. The program has been pretty stable for me for a long time. I'm running in Windows 7. I thought it could possibly be that I had too many files loaded, so I unloaded a whole bunch. But still doing the same. I also have a large number of user maps. But I wouldn't think that would be related. (And of course calibration info is lost if I remove them, although I think all of them are currently unchecked.) When I restart the program it seems fine, until I try to save a file. Actually the message pops up as soon as I go down into the particular directory that I want to save in. But it only crashes once I hit save. Has anybody seen something like this in TF before?

10

TopoFusion Pro / Track/Waypoint elevation shading

« on: April 25, 2012, 01:28:04 PM »

I have collected GPS and temperature data together that I want to display. I thought that I could use a Perl script to create a gpx file that would slip the temperature data into the elevation (or some other) tags in the file, and then use track shading to display the temperature data along the track. The main problem that I'm having is I can't figure out how to force the shading to customize for the range of temperatures/elevations that are in the file. It looks like possibly the range is determined from the max/min values of all loaded gpx files, instead of the specific one of interest or even of those files with extent in the current domain. I'm also unclear whether the data will be treated as real/float or if TF only handles them as integers. I have looked in several places for a way to force a particular elevation range, but have only found it for displaying the tiled elevation data instead of track data. Even if I were only working with 'true' elevation data, I would still like to be able to do this (e.g. for a subset region with less topographic range or to ignore bad out-of-range values). It would be nice if similar color variation could also be done for waypoints instead of only for tracks. Am I missing something?

11

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Server for marine charts?

« on: February 02, 2011, 11:41:27 PM »

Electronic "unofficial" NOAA nautical charts are available for free online. Not sure how compatible for the structure of Topofusion though. The NOAA server that has tiles is http://www.charts.noaa.gov/OnLineViewer/. You might want to look at a neat aerial mashup that someone did in GoogleEarth at http://marine.geogarage.com/routes/ (discovered through http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2008/03/noaa-nautical-charts-google-maps.html). There is also a site somewhere to download a full non-tiled chart (which I have georeferenced in the past as TF user maps for overlay). I don't recall what format the full charts are in though. Also, somehow maptech.com provides online access to both nautical charts and aviation charts (besides topo). The interface begins at http://maptech.mytopo.com/onlinemaps/index.cfm. If you can figure out a way to bring any of this stuff into TF, it would be great.

12

Beta Testing / Re: Setup seems to have started over

« on: February 02, 2011, 11:10:11 PM »

Looks like that did it. Everything seems to be back like I remember it. Thanks for the help! I can send you the log files if you're interested in looking in them for any clues to what happened.

13

Beta Testing / Re: Setup seems to have started over

« on: February 01, 2011, 09:29:32 PM »

Hmm. There are no topofusion.ini files in the "program files\topofusion" folder. Instead, I found one in "C:\users\ldwhite68\AppData\Local\Application Data\Topofusion" and one in "C:\users\ldwhite68\AppData\Local\Topofusion". It looks like the one in "Application Data" is a new default (created 1/30/2011). And the one in "Local" is the one I want (created 12/30/2008; modified 1/20/2011). I also found one from 2009 in one of my document folders (presumably as a backup). I don't understand the difference between these AppData\Local folders and the "Program Files" folder in Vista. I'm guessing that they intended to make Vista friendly toward different users being able to maintain different configurations of the same programs? Should I just delete the newer file and see if the program finds the older configuration file when I start it back up? Or do I need to move the desired file into the position where the new/default file is? (Of course I think I want to backup all these somewhere before doing anything!)

14

Beta Testing / Setup seems to have started over

« on: January 30, 2011, 09:29:06 PM »

After being away for a week on business, I opened up TF4.06 yesterday. It acted like a brand new install. No files loaded, no user maps, etc. Any idea how that could have happened or if I can bring back to how it was without doing all over? The only thing odd I know of that happened while I was gone is that my wife had to buy a new power cable. Is it possible that there was some auto update of Vista, Java, etc. that messed it up? Otherwise TF seems to run the same as before.

15

TopoFusion Pro / Re: GPX draw order

« on: November 21, 2010, 09:44:48 PM »

Glad to know the workaround. It's not something that bothers me very often either. But occasionally I have overlapping tracks and want to have control over which one I'm really looking at. It's nice to know I can do that without having to unload and reload tracks.

16

Feature Requests / "True" distance vs. horizontal distance

« on: November 13, 2010, 11:27:13 PM »

For tracks that have significant elevation gain/loss, it would be very nice in Profile to have the option of either determining distances purely horizontally (as is normally done) or the hypotenuse (spline, if you want to get fancier) of the grades. Of course, there is always the issue of filtering spurious ups/downs, but you are already providing some options for users to control those in your calculations of climb, descent, effort, etc. Even for moderately steep tracks this option could help to alleviate discrepancies with wheeled distance and  to better represent true effort.

17

TopoFusion Pro / Handling of very steep profiles

« on: November 13, 2010, 11:15:31 PM »

It seems there is a small bug (or possibly intentional limit) in the profile gradient calculation. If I digitize a gpx track segment that is very steep, the Profile info gets messed up. For example, I did a test segment with just two points that shows a climb of 221 ft in a distance of 204 ft. Yet the digital readout says a Grade of 0%. In reality it should be over 100% (i.e. more than a 45 degree angle). If I switch the y axis to Grade, then the y axis is scaled from 0% to 14000%, and the x axis shows 0.0 on both ends. In a similar test with a rise of 240 ft over a distance of 294 ft, the correct grade is calculated of 81.7%. But setting the y axis to Grade still produces the obscene graph scaling.

18

TopoFusion Pro / GPX draw order

« on: November 13, 2010, 10:47:07 PM »

This should be a simple question. If I have two gpx tracks that overlap or cross over each other, is there a simple rule or control for which one shows "on top"?

19

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Combo tiles for Garmin custom maps

« on: October 31, 2010, 11:07:50 PM »

Yeah, I figured the problem with tiling of combo maps was related to predefined files not really existing on a server so that you have to actually create them. It would be nice to have someday though.

When I left click for the KMZ dropdown menu, it appears for a fraction of a second and then disappears. Not a big problem, but definitely annoying. This is on a Vista machine. Have not tried in 7.

Yes, TopoWMS is showing up now. Maybe it didn't show up until I had rebooted following enablement of the WMS server?

By the way, the Dakota worked great yesterday while hiking and geocaching. Thanks for the recommendation.

20

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Combo tiles for Garmin custom maps

« on: October 28, 2010, 10:24:42 PM »

Unfortunately I just noticed another inconvenience. My primary area of interest is right along a UTM zone boundary. I had hoped that the tiled export would treat tiles from each zone separately when downloading them (in spite of the fact that this is not done during display on the screen), but instead I end up with a large number of blank tiles (using Topo 4 m). Even if it would just leave off tiles on the other side of the zone boundary when creating the KMZ file, at least that way I would not be wasting tiles toward the 100 tile Garmin limit. I would consider using MyTopo, but that only comes in one (2 m?) resolution for tiling which would significantly decrease my potential area to work with. It looks like the only work-around is to zoom into a smaller area that goes right up to the zone boundary, exporting to two separate files from each side while making sure that the total tiles of both add up to less than 100. I suspect there might still be somewhat strange looking results when the two custom maps are both activated on the GPS. By the way I considered the TopoWMS maps also, but they don't show up in the KMZ tiling options either.

21

TopoFusion Pro / Combo tiles for Garmin custom maps

« on: October 28, 2010, 09:45:51 PM »

OK, I got my Dakota in the mail today and am ready to start seeing what it can do. I went through the tutorial on creating custom maps to use on it and felt pretty good about the process. But in the drop down for tilesets when doing "Tiled KMZ", it looks like every option is there except Combo. Am I blind or is there just no way to use tiling with the Combo maps? By the way, is there a reason why the tileset dropdown menu can only be fully viewed if I keep the left-click button depressed?

22

Feature Requests / A couple of tweaks that would be nice

« on: September 17, 2010, 06:37:29 PM »

1) Is it possible someday that we could use more than 3 calibration points for user maps? Occasionally I have something in a significantly different projection (like an oblique aerial photo or radar image) where there seems to be no way to fit it properly using the current 3 points.

2) I would also like to be able to change the position relative to the icon of waypoints. Right now I don't know of any way to place text other than to the bottom right.

23

Beta Testing / Re: Beta 3.976 - New Maps and new Combo mode

« on: June 17, 2010, 10:13:13 PM »

Besides the error that I bugreported to you upon install to the new beta, it's displaying some funny behavior for gpx points text. When I restarted the program after the freeze-up, it mostly seemed fine. But the displayed text field from my points disappears every time that I pan. If I right-click anywhere on the map, then they reappear. (I'm running in Vista.) I'll see what else I can break now.

24

Feature Requests / Re: Transparent user maps

« on: May 13, 2010, 12:26:26 PM »

As usual, it was my fault. I didn't realize that my cheap editing program was not preserving the transparency when saving to png. I found a free program that has much more capability and now TF is performing beautifully with the transparent png.

25

Feature Requests / Transparent user maps

« on: May 11, 2010, 10:45:07 AM »

It appears that there is currently no support for transparent gif or png user maps. This would really be nice, if for no other reason than just to not be constrained to only rectangular map overlays. (Better overlaying of contours would be nice too though.) Although the alpha blending gives decent visibility through the 'transparent' areas that get shown as white, it doesn't look nearly so nice (like looking through a fog). If I remember correctly, the waypoint symbols are actually transparent bmp. So I would think providing similar capability with user maps should be fairly straightforward.

26

Feature Requests / Re: Tilesets metadata

« on: May 09, 2010, 09:56:34 PM »

I'd be happy to check out the land use link. But I'm not very optimistic. None of the agency websites I've downloaded from does a good job answering the question either, so I suspect that the only way to get a real answer may be to inquire directly to whoever the website caretaker is (if they can be found). Officially the answer is liable to be that updates are put in as soon as they are received from field offices. But the problem is to figure out how often they are actually provided by the agency field offices. Hopefully federal agencies send in current files at least once a year for accounting purposes, but it would be nice to know if they actually have a schedule or just send in whenever they feel like it.

27

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Subset of a gpx file?

« on: May 09, 2010, 09:44:57 PM »

I was only thinking about from one file at a time. But in some cases multiple files might be neat too. I would think multi-file would be easy to support by just requiring that the files to be used would be clicked/highlighted in the list before doing the box select. Would it cause problems if a combination of both track and point files were selected? Does it make a difference for the files to be gpx vs. some other format/protocol?

Usually the files are tracks, but could also be a file of POIs. Some examples:
1) I have a file showing National Wildlife Refuge boundaries in a state, but want to make a smaller file to work with for just one wildlife refuge.
2) I have a gpx track from my GPS that includes multiple trips, but I only want to deal with the part where I was hiking in a particular park. Especially I need to cut out all the other points before creating a network.

"Delete all but selected" is a good name, except of course that I usually want to save to a new name so that the original file is preserved.

28

Feature Requests / Tilesets metadata

« on: May 09, 2010, 09:05:15 PM »

Is there any chance that we could ever get access to basic metadata from the tilesets? For example, I'd like to be able to click on a point and find what date the aerial imagery was taken. Also for the official date on topo maps. That way I can make more intelligent choices about which tilesets to choose. I could also compare the Terraserver topos to USGS to see if there is a more recent map that I might want to go to the extra trouble to get from USGS (since Terraserver is getting kind of old and seems to have no hope for updates). I'm especially interested in how often the data for the public lands tileset are updated. I have seen minor differences between it versus the shapefiles and raster images available from the individual agencies, but can't tell which is the most current.

29

TopoFusion Pro / Subset of a gpx file?

« on: May 09, 2010, 08:50:29 PM »

Sometimes I have a  gpx file with lots of extra points from other areas that I don't want for a particular project. It seems like I should be able to use the box select tool to grab points/segments from a certain area and save to a new file name. If there is a way to do that, then apparently I have not figured out the trick yet. I have only figured out two ways to do this type of edit so far, and they're both unacceptably tedious: 1) I can use the box select to delete,, area by area, the points in the file that I don't want to keep. This is fine for small files, but not when I just want a hundred points out of a file that contains thousands. 2) I could manually edit the gpx file. Not an option that I seriously want to consider.
 
Any suggestions?

30

TopoFusion Pro / Memory in Vista

« on: January 16, 2010, 05:02:55 PM »

Following on my other posts, I've been watching more carefully Task Manager when running Topofusion. It appears that TF is using a lot more resources in Vista than it does in XP. When I load a 3 MB PNG file of a 7.5' USGS quad into User Maps, Task Manager shows an increase in memory use of about 400 MB. Doing the same on my office XP desktop, it only goes up by about 160 MB (which still seems like a lot to me). I'm pretty much limited then to only having 2 quads open at a time in Vista, so that I can't really get a seamless view in the vicinity of quad corners. To make matters worse, if I disable the user map in Vista, the memory does not (ever?) decrease. In XP it quickly comes back down to what it was before.

I wonder if I have any different configuration settings in the two installations that might partly account for the huge differences. I have not done as clear of comparison yet for gpx files. Any insights?

31

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Problems saving gpx files in Vista

« on: January 11, 2010, 12:32:33 AM »

Hey, I decided to revisit this issue tonight. On a hunch, I think I at least partially figured it out. I noticed in Task Manager that Topofusion was taking a huge amount of memory (something like 800 MB). I decided to see what would happen if I unloaded all files. Memory usage went down to a much more reasonable 170 MB or so. And when I tried saving a few points as a .gpx file, it didn't self-destruct anymore!  It still seems a bit strange that simply creating a tiny file can cause such disaster when lots of stuff is loaded (especially since other programs are not prevented from saving at the same time), but at least now it's clear that the problem is related to memory resources.

32

Feature Requests / Re: Features without labels

« on: November 09, 2009, 10:45:38 AM »

Well, how about that! I thought for sure that I had tried tricking it like that before without success. But it works! That's good enough for me. Thanks.

33

Feature Requests / User map file sorting

« on: November 09, 2009, 10:42:07 AM »

In the calibrated User Map Library, there does not seem to be any way to sort the map files. They seem to permanently stay in the order that they were calibrated. It would be much easier to manage if I could sort these both alphabetically and according to whether they are currently selected/enabled. Actually, I think it should be the default arrangement to show currently enabled maps at the top of the list.

34

Feature Requests / Features without labels

« on: November 09, 2009, 10:34:17 AM »

Lots of times I'd like to put a symbol (for a campground, boat ramp, etc.) without any name/label. I have not found any way to do this in TF. I don't know if this is due to a required field in the gpx standard. It would be really nice not to have to keep sticking in some generic default text for cases where I either don't know the name of the feature or just don't want the clutter of additional text.

35

TopoFusion Anouncements / Re: Server issue: Missing topo tiles

« on: November 09, 2009, 10:23:59 AM »

Thank you. I was beginning to think I was going crazy. I was preparing maps for hiking over the weekend and didn't remember the missing tile thing being a normal feature.

36

Feature Requests / Re: GNIS Search

« on: September 14, 2009, 06:25:28 PM »

I've been meaning to ask for GNIS for a long time. It would make it a lot easier to find stuff.

37

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Problems saving gpx files in Vista

« on: September 05, 2009, 10:35:31 AM »

I updated the graphics driver, but it didn't make any difference. I don't need to re-install TF after updating the graphics driver, do I? I'll try to attach the diagnostic file for you. By the way, the laptop is a Compaq Presario CQ50-110US.

38

TopoFusion Pro / Re: Problems saving gpx files in Vista

« on: September 03, 2009, 05:31:34 PM »

In case 1, the file is actually loaded properly on startup. There are no error messages at all. The program just becomes nonresponsive.

In case 2 though, the previously existing file is in the same condition as it was on the previous start, loaded but unmodified.

I don't have any experience running Vista on other systems, but at least on this one the file management behaves pretty strange. For example, there's an empty folder called "My Documents" (separate from "Documents") that "is not accessible". But things normally work OK within "Documents".

Loren

39

TopoFusion Pro / Problems saving gpx files in Vista

« on: September 02, 2009, 09:14:07 PM »

Normally I (happily) run TopoFusion in XP. But with the demise of my work laptop a few days ago, I'm having to deal more with the Vista laptop at home. Unfortunately, TF has a bad habit of freezing up on it:
1) If I try to create a new gpx route using the pencil tool, it gets stuck when I try to save the New File. Surprisingly, the gpx file is actually there when I start the program back up.
2) The same behavior occurs if I try to do "Save all files". Actually, it does this any time that I try to save a gpx file, even on exiting the program. Unlike in case (1) though, any changes are lost when I restart.

This is really frustrating and debilitating. I suspect most of the blame must be on how Vista is configured on the laptop...

Incidentally, I don't see any documentation of what "Save all files" actually does. Obviously, it saves the gpx files; but does it also save calibration info for User Maps? There needs to be some way to manually save the calibrations, since all my calibration work has been lost several times when the program crashed.

Loren

40

User Projects / Re: Current Forest Service Topo's

« on: August 31, 2009, 12:58:18 PM »

I think these TIF images may be what is loaded (with some color modification?) by "http://www.mytopo.com/maps.cfm?". Unfortunately not all the national forests have their data on the server yet (e.g. Ouachita NF in Oklahoma).

The problem with sluggish performance due to TF loading all checked user maps at the start up has been a big problem for me before. I was overlaying with edited Canadian nautical charts over a long section of coast. I had to keep on checking and unchecking files to keep the program from getting completely bogged down. Comparing the sizes of image files that I was using to the memory on the computer, it didn't seem like it should degrade the performance so drastically. My guess was that TF must take the PNG files and work with them as bitmaps, which would be much larger in most cases. Automatically tying to only load user maps within (or maybe near, for caching) the current window would be a big help.

Loren

41

TopoFusion Pro / User Map Library calibration info

« on: February 04, 2009, 11:59:53 PM »

I need a way to transfer the calibration info for several files in the User Map Library between computers. I have a lot of maps that I have calibrated in Topofusion on my work laptop that I will eventually need to be able to work with on my (newer) personal laptop. I can not find any way to do this. I had thought that there would be a file storing all the map calibrations that I could simply copy over and then force to be used on the different computer (maybe with manual editing of the file pathnames). Generally speaking I keep the map files on a jump for easy transferability between systems. Is this currently possible or not? I dread the thought of having to do all the calibrations over again.