searching for businesses , like in google maps

[peterw]

Ok first off this is a great app and deserves all the praise it gets. Apologies if this has been addressed before in a previous discussion, but i couldnt find anything.

I am currently planning a trip throughout the german wine regions. So far I have managed to create pins for all the producers that we plan to visit, and it is just great being able to see all the pins at once on the map together. this makes planning our route during the day as well as where to stay at the end of the day much easier.

But my workflow to get all this information into PE has involved using google maps to search for the producer by name , hope that google maps picks up their name and then automatically places the pin for me within google maps. once this has happened I open the gmap location i-button which then gives me the ability to create a contact. Usually i can then”tag”the contact by entering for eg “wine”as the first name in the contact field. Then i have the ability once in PE to search within contacts under W , where all my contacts””tagged”as wine are all to be found together. I can then pull this up as a pin in PE from the search>contacts in PE. Once the pin is there I edit the pin as required.

My question is this. Is there a more direct way to add pins to PE other than this? I understand that PE is using open map data and google is using its own map data. I also understand that Google havent made their map api available, and I suspect that this may be the trouble. Or I may have missed something and will be delighted if this is so!

 

[BuckyE]

Dear Pete,

I haven’t actually done this yet myself, but have been meaning to try it! Maybe we can work together.

PE can import several different types of “GPS” files. One of them is called GPX. Please see the Help in PE about importing files.

Google Maps can export your map to a KML file. You can google “convert KML GPX” and find a lot of sites that will perform this conversion for you. Then you could, theoretically, import the converted GPX file into PE.

Note that I haven’t been active with Google Maps for a year or so, and the interface has changed quite a bit lately. So I can’t give any really specific advice (about exactly what to click, when, etc.) at the moment. And I haven’t tried any of the conversion services to decide which one might give the most accurate and standards-compliant conversions.

But in general, that would be the way to go. Of course, if PE could import a KML file directly, that would be groovy. However, KML files contain a mess of data that is extraneous to basic GPS-type information, and parsing out the basic Name/Lat/Lon/Notes stuff from a KML is a nightmare.

Please let us know if the above is any help!

[Author]

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