Sunday, March 18, 2012

New Workforce GPS Tracking App Announced

Electric Compass Tracker Edited

A new GPS tracker app designed to help businesses track their workforce and assets in the field has been released this week. The Electric Compass Tracker will allow employers to see the location of all their workers in the field in real-time, allowing managers and dispatchers to more effectively address field business issues and increase productivity. The app can be used on any Android, Blackberry, iPhone, or iOS device and works with installed vehicle trackers and asset tracking devices also.

This app allows managers to find the closest worker to a location to respond to service calls or sales opportunities; receive alerts for workers speeding, entering or leaving undesignated areas or unauthorized travel; view full GPS history of workers movements and time elapsed; or access worker locations anywhere from a smartphone or tablet. read more

Smart Watches Strive to Replace GPS Watches

viewranger

GPS sport watches have become quite popular in the last few years, but soon smart watches may replace them for versatility and style. ViewRanger, the popular mapping app for smartphone and tablets, has announced it is compatible with the highly anticipated Android Wear, allowing for more hands-free GPS navigation and tracking with your smartphone and smart watch. The app will be compatible and ready-to-run on smart watches from LG, Samsung, Google and Motorola. Similar to more expensive GPS watches, this app will turn your smart watch into a GPS, complete with information about your location and route, altitude, heading, waypoint distance, distrance travelled, height gained and a large navigational arrow that uses a compass function in the watch to point you in the right direction. read more

Stay Organized with GPS Location Based Reminders

EasilyDo is one of many apps designed to help organize your life with location-based services.

EasilyDo is one of many apps designed to help organize your life with location-based services.

If you are anything like me, there are days when I have the memory of a goldfish and end up making multiple trips to the same places and forgetting things anyway. Fortunately, I must not be the only one, because there are several apps available for iPhone and Android that are designed to send location-based reminders using GPS. Need to pick up milk? We now have an app for that. read more

Garmin Navigates GPS App Territory for iPhone and Android

hand-holding-samsungThe release of Garmin’s new smartphone app, Viago, gives fans a chance to utilize Garmin’s powerful GPS software on their smartphone. Available on both Android and iPhone, the basic Viago app costs only $2 and offers a range of features such as Worldwide maps, address search, turn-by-turn navigation in your region, realistic junction views, lane assistance, current speed limits and posted speed limits. The interface is clean and simple and looks sharp. But what makes this app both powerful and pricey is the ability to customize with premium add-ons which can cost anywhere from $5 to $20 depending on the add-on. read more

Handheld GPS 201: Mapping software

With today’s topic, I’m starting a new series, a follow up to my Handheld GPS 101 posts. Are you ready to move on to the next class? Alright then. Today’s topic is mapping software — and I’m not talking about maps for your GPS here, but rather desktop or laptop software that will turn you into a power user. read more

Garmin intros HomePort marine planning app

Garmin-HomePort-1 Garmin has announced a new marine planning software desktop application dubbed HomePort. After the introduction of this and BaseCamp, perhaps we’ll see a new auto trip planner in the near future. Click here for the full news release.

Transferring features from a PDF map to your GPS

Transfer PDF map features to GPS I learned the other day about a new 10,000 acre tract of public lands near me. There are no trail maps of the area and I am dying to explore it (once all this rain stops). I’ll probably do another post on prepping my GPS for exploring there, but this one aspect warrants its own post.

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Garmin, trails and missed opportunities

When planning a new outdoor adventure, I usually search online for tracks that I can download to my GPS. There are two places I typically look:

The latter is actually my first choice, since it is (IMHO) the best trail database in the US. What continues to amaze me is that Garmin doesn’t seem to realize what they have. We still get maps with plenty of missing trails, and they seem to be based on ancient USGS data.

I see no reason Garmin can’t utilize their MotionBased data to build a better trail map. They could decide how many tracks they would need for a given trail, and how much error was allowed before throwing out a track. A little follow up by hand (and even this could be automated) could establish trail junctions and where they connect to the nearest road (i.e., trailheads).

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Garmin backcountry notes

Garmin-Oregon-multi-point

The folks at Garmin have been quite busy lately, hitting us with software and firmware releases, and even new Oregon models. Let’s start with software…

Garmin BaseCamp

This new mapping software, which we first mentioned when it was announced back in January, is now available for download (there is also a Beta version for Macs). Note this disclaimer from the download notes:

“BaseCamp will only recognize MapSource products that contain digital elevation model (DEM) data. Some examples of products that contain elevation data are Topo U.S. 24K, Topo U.S. 24K National Parks (version 3), Topo U.S. 100K (version 4 and later), Topo U.S. 2008, Topo Australia, Topo Canada (version 4), Topo Deutschland, Topo Great Britain, and Topo products produced by many Garmin distributors.”

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Garmin ecoRoute

Garmin ecoroute

UPDATE: TWICE is reporting that ecoRoute works with 2xx and 7xx series nuvis.

Another Garmin announcement today is ecoRoute, a software update for some nuvi units that adds a "less fuel" route option. Additionally, ecoRoute includes a Fuel Report that tracks fuel usage over time, and a Mileage Report that monitors mileage and fuel usage on a per-trip basis.

You can see if your nüvi is compatible with ecoRoute through a free, downloadable software update at www.garmin.com/ecoroute.