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The work on the new version of Kosmos is in full speed. I planned to release it in August, but I had too little spare time for it - most of my weekends were spent hiking and mapping and was also pretty busy on my “real” work.

Anyway, I updated the “Kosmos Future” page on OSM wiki pages with the latest status. What I am really excited about is the new feature - showing Kosmos-generated maps on mobile phones using MGMaps, MGMaps is a free Java ME application for showing Web maps from various sources (OpenStreetMap, Yahoo, MSN and more). The default behavior is to download map tiles on demand, but the user can also download them manually and store them in the phone’s memory.

This “stored maps” feature of MGMaps gave me the idea of providing a way to show Kosmos maps with MGMaps. I added support for generating MGMaps-style map tiles in Kosmos console - you simply generate the tiles for a specified Kosmos project and then copy them to your phone. The results can be seen here (NOTE: the “Osmarender” text on the bottom of the screen is shown because I had to mark my tiles with one of the map types supported by MGMaps, and I chose Osmarender).

Apart from the fact that using this method you do not overload OSM servers by mass-downloading tiles, it also provides a way to have maps customized to your needs on your phone to help you with the navigation (MGMaps can connect to a GPS receiver). I’m already thinking about using this solution when hiking instead of Garmin + mkgmaps combination. Note however that MGMaps work for Java ME-enabled phones only.

I finally got around to try out Osmxapi and I developed a simple client to download the latest data for Slovenia. I played around with some simple batch files to download the data, convert it to the Garmin’s img format (using Mkgmap), zip it and upload it to an FTP server. So the updates of Slovenia map should now be more frequent.

Good news for hikers (and cyclists) is that I created a separate version of Slovenia map which has more visible hiking related features. The problem with standard Garmin features is that they show footways as thin dashed lines which are very hard to see when you’re outdoor in the sun. Also, the tracks (unpaved roads) are shown in practically the same way as minor forest footways.

The hiking map I prepared shows footways clearly (as thicker red solid lines). Tracks are shown as thick gray lines (I borrowed the “border” feature for this). All other roads are shown using a same feature, so there’s no distinction between minor roads and motorways, but I think this is not really important for hiking. Anyway, if you have enough free memory on your unit, you can upload both maps and switch between them when needed.

You can find the maps on the Garmin Stuff page.

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• Project White: Automated UI Testing
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• Garmin GPS Unit Waypoint Icons Table

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• 101 Design Patterns & Tips for Developers

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• Web Service Interoperability? Not from where I sit…

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• Visual Studio Programmer Themes Gallery

GPS

• Improving Position Measurement Accuracy In Consumer-Grade GPS Receivers - Part II

Misc

• Marvão, Portugal 3D in Google Earth

Development

• ObjectMother - Easing Test Object Creation in XP

.NET Development

• Cosmos - operating system written in C#
• I’ve got the Iteration #1 Blues
• CodePlex.Diagnostics
• MoMA - The Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA) tool
• MSDN Code Gallery
• “C# 3.0 Language Specification” ebook
• Using System.ComponentModel Attributes to your advantage

VisualStudio

• Visual Local History 2005 - add-in which provides the IDE with a local file history à la Eclipse

GPS

• Improving Position Measurement Accuracy In Consumer-Grade GPS Receivers - Part I

6 months ago I was busy developing GpsTrekker, an application for hiking and cycling enthusiasts. But then I joined the OpenStreetMap community and forgot about GpsTrekker. It was still in very early phase, but you could load your GPS tracks data and show various elevation contours with it (see image above).

So this is kind of a reminder post for me :). Maybe I’ll include features of GpsTrekker into the Kosmos application (or some Kosmos extension) in the (distant?) future.