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Dear Ozgeo,
In PE version 1.6.4, top-level Categories of POIs can be shown/hidden in the Settings menu. Lower level discrimination awaits further development, but we’re confident it will be forthcoming!
In the mean time, look into managing POIs through the Settings (gears icon) > Map Layers > POIs list!
Unless, of course, PE imported my Waypoints/Pins/endpoints and constructed its own geodesic “path.” That I have no way of evaluating!
I’m very sorry to have missed this. But for the sake of anyone who might find it, I can say,,,
I have an iPad 2, 32 mb, WIFI & Verizon 3G. I’ve taken it to both England and Italy. ( Oh, I’m American!) So it has had a real workout for a cumulative three weeks abroad. And without any kind of data plan: WiFi in the rental apartments, but no connection of any kind while walking the cities or driving the countryside. My lovely wife had her iPhone 4S, with a very limited data plan on both these trips.
PE performed like a champ all the way through. At one point, our friends were asking me to give the driving directions, as they preferred that to using their older SatNav!
Comparing the usability and performance of the two Apple devices from our experiences, I’ll make two points.
1. The larger screen of the iPad was invaluable. Period, the end!
2. In a very few limited situations, the iPhone was able to get a GPS fix when the iPad was not able.
One time, Loie got a map in a train, when my iPad could not. It was fun following along, just to see where we were, but obviously we didn’t need to navigate while riding a train!
Several times (both on our trips, and while around home), we noticed that the iPhone acquired a GPS fix rather more quickly than did the iPad when driving. There’s something about the combination of being in a car/train AND moving quickly that the poor old iPad 2 struggles with.However, please remember that my beloved iPad is now –in device lives– ancient! I’d be surprised if newer models were’t a heck of a lot quicker.
So for my 62 year old bifocalled eyes, the larger screen is important. “Your mileage may vary!”
And finally, no, neither of our devices needed or indeed would have particularly have benefitted by having an external GPS receiver. The only thing that might improve performance would potentially be a newer iPad! Ooh, with Retina screen!
Thanks for your consideration! Yes, the borders for French Regions are quite exact.
I think it’s not the borders, on the map, that are the main concern. Mostly it’s a Search/List function. (And this may be true of other countries, I don’t know!) Since most references to places in France use a Department, it would be handy to have the data listed that wy, or to be able to View-on-Map for a Department.
And while I have your ear, would it be possible to consider the line styles for borders? It looks to me as if National borders are solid gray, and remain so at all zoom levels.
In the Unites States, the Regional (state) borders are dashed gray lines, but at some close zoom level they become dashed purple. I think this is the same in France. (There are no Counties for England, Scotland, etc. People almost always refer to counties when giving locations in England.) It would be nice if these admin subboundaries could stay the same style (which should probably also always be gray) at all zoom levels. It gets confusing when they change to a style that looks very much like another type of boundary!
Thank you very much.
I’m looking forward to future tweaks!
Oh, and it occurs to me after looking back at the current Map Lists, that the first subcategory lists of France, the U.S. and all other countries I look at have tags under the subcategory names saying “Region.”
It’s true of France that the heirarchy goes Country > Region > Department > commune (?), I think.
But in the U.S., it goes Country > State > County/City, etc. Perhaps the “Region” tag in the Map List should just be dropped? It might actually be more confusing than it is correct!
Thanks!
My pleasure. I wonder how many users would run across these problems? I seem to be the collector of oddball circumstances!
Aaarrrrrgh! I wrote a big long response, and now it’s not here?! I must have done something wrong. Or maybe it will turn up later. But in the meantime,,,
I am referring to both. I assume the Maps list and the border lines are derived from/based on the same data set from OSM. (Note, I have no idea how this really works!)
Since no one who writes travel articles or talks about places in France identifies the location of places by French Region, but rather by Departments, it would be helpful to have the Maps list and the border lines (and the labels inside the border lines) be delineated by Departments, not Regions.
Thank you!
Dear Vic,
Thank you, thank you! I’m soon, when I do a major CSV Import for France, going to be working towards having upwards of 10,000 Pins worldwide, but most of them in western Europe. (I’m crazy!)
The developers keep talking about Pin Clustering, which I assume is a major pain to implement. I don’t need or want clustering, I just want to be able to manipulate Groups of Pins individually. Same as in the Map Layers for POIs!
Just as a temporary workaround, another thread suggested using the iPad’s (and maybe the iPhone’s) Settings: General > Accesibility > Invert Colors as a way to blast the look of PE. (I think this was in relation to a night-time view.) Not the ideal solution, but might be worth a look!
Current Map! Hooray! The distance challenged cannot thank you enough. Awesome!
Thank you! After reading your post, I found a work-around, because I definitely want a rhumb line. (It’s a long story.)
I used Google Maps to make a two-point Line and added a Pin for each endpoint (3 objects total); exported the map to KML; used a free online converter to convert my KML to GPX, imported to PE. I’ve got a rhumb line track, with identified/named endpoints, and am happy as a clam.
Worked a charm! So if I’m the only user who ever requested a rhumb line Track, please ignore adding such to PE. Not worth it for so few requests!
Thanks for your explanation, it was the hint I needed.
Thanks! I’ve posted this idea before, explaining that I am totally “distance challenged.” I don’t have any really good idea how far away half of 20 km is going to be from me. So the Search radii do little good for me.
There are also many cases where I want to see results on a much smaller scale: within only a few city blocks from my current location. Would that be 300 m/ft? I have no idea.
Trying to have enough different radii to satisfy all the different possibilities –and getting me understand them!– is futile!
Thanks for your kind words.
Just in case anyone else ever searches out this thread on CSVs, I add one more little caveat.
My latest home-made FMP CSVs would not Import. It took me an hour of fiddling around to figure that for some unknown reason, My record delineating “paragraph returns” were Macintosh Carriage Returns, whereas PE wants Linux Line Feeds. Good lord!
So if you’re having problems importing a CSV, that would be one thing to check.
Thank you! I will work with this and see what I can do.
Lesson learned: back up more often!
How about a simple Current Map choice? Zoom the map to show some arbitrary area, and have a “Radius” of “Current Map:” show all of any chosen POI Category that occur on the zoomed map?
I’d like that!
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!
Holy Moses! Has this been a learning experience?
1. Apache Open Office refused to stop Auto-correcting my icon field from marker-pin-small to Marker-pin-small, and PE refused to recognize the latter. So, on to Filemaker Pro…
2. In FMP, it was easy to create auto-data-entering icon and color fields, and a concatenating field to merge and munge five other fields into a Notes field, for example:
Rock Art. Condition: 2; ambience: 0; access: 0.
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=33425
However, I still had to apply a grep-based find/change to the exported CSVs so the FMP soft-returns became true line feeds. Luckily I remembered how to do that!
And, totally luckily, my FMP-exported CSVs were all double-quote escaped, and PE seems to be honoring the escaping, and preserving the line feeds in the Notes field. Marvelous.
Thank you for your prompt help!
I was confused, because I thought I had downloaded and imported CSVs from this site before. Then I noticed that I was not getting all the available sites/pins, and went back to the administrators. They worked on some scripts and now I have to replace all the CSVs with new ones. OK, but, the new ones didn’t work.
However, I think what’s happened is that, before, I was actually importing GPX files. And those files had “headers” that matched the PE-expected headers. But these furshlugginer CSVs have crazy headers! NOW I see.
OK, I’m slogging through the CSVs, fixing the headers (which, if that were the only problem, I could do at one whack with a text editor) but also creating a new notes field that will concatenate some of the other columns into a PE readable form.
Oh brother! The things we go through for our maps!
Thank you for your patient help. You are the best.
Dear Nounours,
1. Coming from a paper-only background directly to PE, I have no idea: do OSM based maps change so much in, for example, six months? If that’s the case, then yes, I need to become accustomed to updating maps before a trip!
However, the sticking point is, as mentioned above, the current inability to update any particular map alone. I’m glad to hear that the developers are working on this!
2. I have what we in the U.S. call a sneaking suspicion that working offline is going to be a very small niche concern within a relatively few years: three or so at the most. Of course we understand its advantages, but…
A. I belong to the online community/bulletin board Slow Travel ( http://slowtalk.com/ , http://slowtalk.com/groupee/ ) and have for years. See, for instance, http://slowtalk.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/280109402/m/954004888001 .
I can say from experience that for every one person talking there about working offline, there are ten people trying to find out how to, and for the most part succeeding in, having affordable data connections while traveling.
B. The American company T-Mobile has just announced a plan to eliminate roaming charges. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/technology/t-mobile-to-make-it-cheaper-to-make-calls-while-abroad.html ) Whether they will be able to actually sustain this remains to be seen, but obviously it’s of concern to a lot of people.
So…
C. With those two points in mind, the future of PE, and its strength, will lie with customization, personalization, ease of storing one’s data for recovery, ability to link to/suck data from the other big central mapping providers, sharing data amongst users, providing links to useful data sources, creative ways to use data we collect, or that comes from OSM, an ability to feed-back to OSM/become part of that community, etc. Not with working offline per se. We’ll see!
