This is shaping up like a week of useful new web applications.
EarthNC‘s free TakItWithMe, which launches today, does one useful thing really well: Turn Google MyMaps content (or even KML) into a GPX file that can be uploaded to a GPS device. If that GPS device is a Garmin and you’re running Windows, you can upload from within the web browser after installing the Garmin Communicator plugin (Mac version coming — until then upload manually using LoadMyTracks).
The KML upload feature, in beta, is useful as a way of getting other geoweb content onto a GPS device. EarthNC’s Virgil Zetterlind writes that it works with the KML feeds output by Picasa Web, Flickr, Yahoo Pipes and Platial.
The upshot: Annotate with Google MyMaps when exploring a future adventure — then easily upload those points to your GPS device and have them handy while in the field.
The entire east coast of Ireland south from Greystones, Co Wicklow, just 25 km south of Dublin, is represented by extremely poor, low resolution images from DigitalGlobe, NASA. This is the most densely populated part of Ireland and Google’s images & maps of it are just crap. They’ve been like this since I first started using Google maps and GEarth several years ago.
It’s crazy, seeing as tiny islands like Gomera have wonderfully detailed images of empty mountains…
Any chance of seeing some high resolution images by, say, 2010?
Also, north of this line, the images have not been updated for several years. As construction proceeds apace, this means the images fail to show new locations, in a few cases entire new towns. And the maps have not been updated either.
Not very good, eh? So you can imagine I’m not overly impressed by all these GPS innovations…