TrekBuddy

[guest]

HI. your tool is great, been using it from the start.

I've got two notices:

1. VEarth (Bing) maps are with German locale (German labels) could you please revert it to english labels or put the select option in map type?
should be easy, just to change the "&mkt=en-us" element in the link

2. Could you please update User Defined Map dialog and enhance it in a way that each field (X, Y, Z) will be set under general variable label, like X field will be %Xnum%, Y field will be %Ynum% and so on. In this case user could use this variables to create his link as he (and provider) needs. For example like this:
[code]
http://map.provider.com/somethingimportant?%Xnum%blahblah%Znum%_%Ynum%
[/code]

I hope I made myself clear. ...
Thanks for your effort. Your tool helps a lot of people around.

Petr

[MartinZ]

I'm a bit out of time at the moment. But I think, I'll do something about this program again soon .

If you need it urgently, perhaps try to load source code and implement little changes yourself.
At least, I'll upload a bit more actual source code quite soon.

[guest]

Hello yesterday, i dowload the googleak.net 1.5.2.2, i it was perfect in the work ofice, but today at home it don't work in any one of 3 computers.

I d'ont understant.

Tihs is the error:

[url]http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/386450_2845199614930_1407588276_3060801_1841871199_n.jpg[/url]

[MartinZ]

GoogLeak.NET needs Microsoft's .NET-framework installed.

Some funktions need the Version 3.5

Install this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/es-es/details.aspx?FamilyID=333325fd-ae52-4e35-b531-508d977d32a6

[vincentiuzz]

its amazing for me...
thanksss....

[wqsa]

MartinZ - thank You for your work!

Is it possible somehow edit wpt icons ??

I want wpt icon to be only little dot, something like this –



- but even more smaller dots.
MOBAC is not able to permanently store wpt-s to map, am i right?
Sorry for english ))

[guest]

Thanks for the hard work you have done on this Martin.

And thanks to others, in particular Bogi for assisting and troubleshooting. You two make a great team.

I've used several Trek Buddy map creation applications, and this one has great features and the largest selection of maps. I will stick with this one.

Thanks again for your efforts and devotion.

Frank

[fiery_]

I use v1.5.2.0 and I would like to change the language of Google maps and found that conf.cfg has an option like this:
UserUrlMapPart2=.google.com/vt/lyrs=m@107&hl=de&x=

I changed the "hl=de" to "hl=bg", but when I looked with Wireshark the "&hl=de" part is not sent at all. It seems that this setting is not read.

Is "UserUrlMapPart2" ever read from conf.cfg? Or if anyone knows, how could I change the maps language?

[MartinZ]

[Wolfgan]

Hi,
FOA, thanks for this tool, it's amazing for preparing custom maps.

Being a long while since using Googleak and wanted to update a map. In order to make the file transfer to my tablet easier (better use a few big files than hundreds of smaller ones), I switched to tbtar format, but facing some issues with a window error after downloading the tiles: "Could not find a part of the path C:\Temp\Googleak.NET\tbtar\goog_9map\1472x1408_170-305\1472x1408_170-305.tar'' in TarTmiAllocated. File:"

Without tar option everything works OK, but I'm clueless on what's happening (7z.exe is on the same folder as Googleak BTW)

Any clue? Thanks in advance, Wolf.

[MartinZ]

[bat_ventzi]

Hello. This is my first post in the forum and I want to share my thoughts and notes about googleak.NET v1.5.2.1.

I bought Samsung B2710 recently and installed TrekBuddy 1.1.1 on it. My first tool for creating offline maps was Mobile Atlas Creator v1.9.8 but I found that I can’t create offline maps from google maps so I switched to googleak.NET. I am exporting tarred maps for TB.

This is my machine configuration on which my opinions are based: Intel i3 M370, 4GB DDR3 1033MHz, Seagate ST9640320AS, NTFS partition, 4KB allocation unit, Windows XP x86 SP3.

1 ) I found that multithread downloading works best if the thread number is 2-4. I’ve tried two ISPs and the results were similar. If I use more threads, I get many timeout errors when the tiles that I’ve downloaded reaches multiples of 1024 (I suspect that google is in the root of that ). I found also that if you close the application while the tiles are being downloaded, the window disappears but the application continues running (I think that downloading threads aren’t killed when the window closes) and I must end the process manually through the task manager.

2 ) I propose that layer folders can be named with two decimal digits. As an example I can give this: the current layer name for google map with zoom level 7 is “goog_7map” and my proposal is to name it this way “goog_07map”. This will ease fast layer switching from TrekBuddy in cases where you have atlases with detail levels with one and two decimal digits. This naming scheme can be made with a script that is executed after the atlas was made. The script can just rename the folders and alter the atlas.tar file, but I don’t have time now to write the script.

3 ) The error while exporting a map for TB: “The process cannot access the file '...\temp.dat' because it is being used by another process. Additional info: in TB_EXPORT” on my machine can be fixed with turning off the antivirus software (in my case Avast 7) or adding an antivirus exception (maybe, it’s not tested).

4 ) I found that you MUST turn your antivirus off (or just add an exception for googleak.NET working folders; tested) if you are using Avast 7 and exporting maps, because it slows down the exporting process with great deal of time (I’ll give you some numbers later).

5 ) I found this site and this executable “pngout.exe”. I’ve experimented with some PNGs and found that this program manages compressing exported PNGs with compression ratio around 70-80%. The compression isn’t like ordinary compression, it keeps the png file format, but makes the file smaller.

6 ) Maybe the exporting process can also be made multithread. In case of my processor with two cores and HyperThreading on, googleak.NET uses up to 25% of processor time while exporting. I’m expecting, though, that if googleak.NET have used 50% or more, my HDD reading and writing speed won’t be sufficient as I am using a single HDD.

7 ) If you export google map layer (I mean the layer with the streets only) it is better to export it as png with 32 colors. The difference in size when using less colors isn’t that great. The difference in size when using jpg with 78 quality isn’t that great, too, but the fidelity of the jpg map is worse. So for that kind of atlases I will use png.

8 ) If you export google hybrid layer it is better to export it as jpg, because the size of the png map is much, much greater.

Note: I had exact sizes for 7 and 8 but I deleted the atlases.


Maybe you have noticed that I have 4GB RAM on x86 XP and yes the OS can’t “see” all that RAM, so I am using RamDrive software that can use that RAM. Here there are the figures that I have promised to give you:

1 ) google map, png, 32 colors, tiles, tb, tbtar folders on HDD, antivirus off – average exporting time = 11:08 min, average tarring time = 00:06 min
2 ) google map, png, 32 colors, tiles, tb, tbtar folders on RamDrive, antivirus off – average exporting time = 9:41 min, average tarring time = 00:06 min
3 ) google street overlay, jpg, 78 quality, tiles, tb, tbtar folders on HDD, antivirus on – average exporting time = somewhere around 1 hour !!!
4 ) google street overlay, jpg, 78 quality, tiles, tb, tbtar folders on HDD, antivirus off – average exporting time = 19:07 min, average tarring time = 00:36 min
5 ) google street overlay, jpg, 78 quality, tiles, tb, tbtar folders on RamDrive, antivirus off – average exporting time = 10:09 min, average tarring time = 00:10 min
6 ) google street overlay, jpg, 50 quality, tiles, tb, tbtar folders on RamDrive, antivirus off – average exporting time = 10:05 min, average tarring time = 00:07 min

Note: All the tests are for map that is 32512x32512 pixels and cut to pieces that are 250x350 pixels. The RamDrive filesystem is FAT32, 4KB allocation unit.


As a conclusion from these and some other tests I can say that:

1 ) you SHOULD turn your antivirus off
2 ) it’s very good if you can put “tiles” and “tb” folders (or parts of them) on separate drives (I mean physically different) or use RamDrive. This way you can save some exporting time, because you are separating the reading of many small files and writing of many small files.
3 ) if you can’t put “tiles” folder (it’s too big, for instance) it is still better to put “tb” folder on different drive
4 ) it doesn’t matter where your “tbtar” folder is, because tarring time is very small compared to exporting time

[MartinZ]