Palm Pre Offline Gps Maps Working Perfectly !

[nrupesh1 0]

Hi Amitabh... I have followed the instructions given by you.....unfortunately my google maps app shows location not found......and MapTool is always blank....Will highly appreciate if you could help me out here....thanks a ton in advance.

PS. I live in hyd....AT&T palm pre plus unlocked

Is your GPS working ? Check in location services and switch it on.

Then have you selected offline as map renderer in MapTool

After switching on your data see if google maps works (it takes a few tries before it'll work due to slow data speeds etc) If google maps is showing location that means gps is working so we can then troubleshoot the maptool thing.

Also ensure that you have hyderabad maps downloaded since maptool will locate you there and if hyderabad maps are not present in the required folder (as per instructions) then it'll show white screen.

Thanks a lot Amitabh....I had to enable Google Services on GPS option and now its working perfectly.... one more question...am unable to navigate on MapTool (offline) like i can do on Google Maps. That is i cant navigate away from my current position in Map Tool. I am a novice, but is it that in offline MapTool only one tile is loaded when you are stationary thus cant navigate to other tiles.....

[tarun_kabra 204]

^^^

My net is little slow from few days, so can u make and upload All india map ?

Will do that, but the zoom levels will have to be low since with high zoom levels each city is over 200mb. So all india would be many GBs. Will try if i can get upto 14 zoom level.

Maybe it'll be better if you get some selected cities with 17-18 zoom levels.

Right said, it will run in GBs, I had downloaded the same for MG Maps (Zoom - 5 to 15) (though to use it with BB) and the size came to 18.2 GB (46,97,549 Files, 895 Folders), I didn't have any SD card to try these, so just using my idle hard disk capacity. I doubt if any S/w (MG Maps or Trekbuddy) can handle that much of files / size. I think it will be total waste of time/data usage to download all India maps, better to download the required city, route maps.

Regards

[ami1 237]

Nav IT 3D

There's another app called NavIT 3D which is very good. It shows 3D perspective maps like the stand alone car gps units and has audio directions and it does routing so you can select destination and it'll start showing & speaking directions.

You can install from app catalog for free. It will install another dependency for speech output.

You can download maps from here and since the maps are in single bin files (around 50Mb for a city) they don't eat up meta space like the millions of image files for map view.

It doesn't seem to zoom out too much like map view though.

I've also noticed that if you GPS is not giving good accuracy you may need to check that the GPS antenna clip is properly attached and has not come off. (Bottom left of the battery, there's a small rectangular thing which you can remove to see wifi & gps antenna cables/clips. Mine had come off once so gps was giving low accuracy fix & taking long time to get the fix.

Putting the clip back tightly fixed the accuracy to very good or excellent usually.

I use the GPS Fix app which keeps the gps alive by pinging it every 15 min.

[tarun_kabra 204]

You can download maps from here and since the maps are in single bin files (around 50Mb for a city) they don't eat up meta space like the millions of image files for map view.

This is the best thing if compared to Maptool that maps are in single Bin File.

Not only we can download custom maps, there are ready made maps available for use with NavIT also. Just Check here:-

WebOS Internals

Navit Wiki OSM

These provide further links and guides to get maps working with Navit. Though I couldn't find any for India in particular, but that can be made.

Regards

[river 0]

Can someone help me out? I tried to copy the google maps folder into Palm as ".MapTool" as instructed. But I always failed and was asked to "type a file name", which possibly means ".Maptool" can't be a valid name. As the consequence, I can't use maptool and it shows as complete blank screen. Can someone tell me what is wrong? Thank you very much!

[Bablus 66]

and I thought only I am dumb..

Thanks for asking River..

[ami1 237]

I think i got that error once but don't remember what I did. Usually if the usb drive is formatted as FAT instead of FAT 32 this should happen.

See if you can copy it as MapTool (without the dot) and then in a linux commandline (using WOSQI or Novacom) do:

cd /media/internal

mv MapTool .MapTool

Otherwise, try creating a folder .MapTool on the usb drive as follows:

cd /media/internal

mkdir .MapTool

then go into usb drive mode again and try to copy the contents inside .MapTool on you PC to inside .MapTool in the pre usb drive

[mihirf2003 7]

i tried maptool but it stores the mapfiles as images and this messes up the photoroll app on the pre... u get all the unnecessary files of the maps in the app which makes it difficult to find the actual photos in the phone.

Is the above problem valid or have i done something wrong? plz suggest something...

thanks....

[ami1 237]

i tried maptool but it stores the mapfiles as images and this messes up the photoroll app on the pre... u get all the unnecessary files of the maps in the app which makes it difficult to find the actual photos in the phone.

Is the above problem valid or have i done something wrong? plz suggest something...

thanks....

This didn't happen to me from what I can remember (my pre is currently unusable till i replace its screen - so i can't check now)

Do the images show up as a folder (.MapTool) in the photoroll app or do all of them just pop up in between your own images ? I do remember some other app whose images use to appear in the photorol but only as another folder so there wasn't much problem.

[mihirf2003 7]

numbered folders appear.. as in 4673,4674,4675 etc...

[man-saturday 32]

Just checked on my Pre and yes loop mounting does seem to disable the USB drive mode as pre needs to unmount some filesystems before allowing usb drive.

Am trying to put in a command to unmount it in the script that pre runs before it goes into usb drive mode but let me doublecheck first. Use the normal folder method till then.

Hi ami1,

Could you find a solution for this? I am using maptool with pulled maps of Mumbai on Pixi plus. Though the maps are about 46 Mb, they take up around 2 GB of space

Can you reccomend a solution to :-

1. Opt for a different WebOs software & offline Maps where this multiple file issue does not arise?

2. A way to effectively compress the space taken by these map images & continue using Maptool.

Thanks for your help!

[ami1 237]

^ yes, there is a way to store the map files so that they don't take up so much space on FAT32 drives. It involves storing the files with a smaller block size. Currently, the files are very small but they take up a minimum default space on FAT drives and due to the very large number of individual files the total space becomes more.

This problem is there for all offline maps in BB/Android/PalmPre etc.

Go to http://www.mgmaps.com/stored/ and browse down to the page end, just before the end there is a paragraph called compressing map tiles. You can use that method. PL NOTE I haven't used that method yet but there is no risk so you can try it.

[digitalnirvana 646]

Nav IT 3D

There's another app called NavIT 3D which is very good. It shows 3D perspective maps like the stand alone car gps units and has audio directions and it does routing so you can select destination and it'll start showing & speaking directions.

You can install from app catalog for free. It will install another dependency for speech output.

You can download maps from here and since the maps are in single bin files (around 50Mb for a city) they don't eat up meta space like the millions of image files for map view.

It doesn't seem to zoom out too much like map view though.

I've also noticed that if you GPS is not giving good accuracy you may need to check that the GPS antenna clip is properly attached and has not come off. (Bottom left of the battery, there's a small rectangular thing which you can remove to see wifi & gps antenna cables/clips. Mine had come off once so gps was giving low accuracy fix & taking long time to get the fix.

Putting the clip back tightly fixed the accuracy to very good or excellent usually.

I use the GPS Fix app which keeps the gps alive by pinging it every 15 min.

Hi Amitabh at what level should the map be selected, looking for detailed map of Kolkata and adjoining areas, please could you help with the map file selection. Is NavIT better or maptools map better. Also please guide as to the exact steps to be followed to install the NavIT map after extracting, new to WebOS. Thanks.

[ami1 237]

Select upto zoom level 15 (ie 1 to 15). Beyond 15 the number of images/size becomes too big. upto 14 its hardly a few thousand images.

Usually you won't need to zoom in beyond 15. Initially you can even do only upto 14. then once its working properly go to 15 or 16 if you need.

NavIT gives a 3D type of view like the GPS navigators in cars. maptool is like google maps etc. NavIT also has voice directions etc so its technically very good. But i never used it too much.

You can install both and try them out for some days.

You can copy the navit maps by connecting pre in usb drive mode.

Edited April 17, 2011 by ami1

[digitalnirvana 646]

Thanks, do they work for Pixi Plus? Would appreciate if you please create detailed Kolkata map for maptool and share the URL. Also, just the steps in post 1 would suffice or anything else need to be aware of?

[digitalnirvana 646]

Hi Amitabh,

Sorry to be a bother but please could you create detailed Kolkata map for maptool and share the URL. I tried navit but not able to do so properly.

[ami1 237]

^ Will do.