I love TrekBuddy!

It is not often that you find a really useful and solid tool, but this time I think I have. The background to this story is that I had some problems getting InFlight to work the way I wanted it to work. First of all, it is a program designed for amateur aviators, which implies a somewhat different feature set in the program compared to what I would actually need:

1) Starting and stoping of logging involed too many button presses. I guess when you are in an airplane, you really just set it to log once, and then leave it like that until you are on the ground and have lots of time to fiddle around with stoping the logging.

2) Getting the log included conneted to the web server and getting the KML track from there. Not really convenient if you are on a trip and just want to geo tag you images in the evening.

3) The log file worked great in Google Earth, but the time information did not suit HoudahGeo: it could not find any time information, which made the whole excercise a bit less useful.

Now, when searching for programs, I had actually stumbled across TrekBuddy and tried it, but it is a midlet, and in my browsing, I just got to the point where I was greated by a seemingly endless stream of questions for permission to acessing the file system. Very off-putting. Also, I did not get a map installed so nothing was moving, I got an older version, so my GPS device was not supported, so.. it was all a mess really.

But, in my failure to make proper use of InFlight, I seached for programs again, and decided to give TrekBuddy another try, since it really seemed to have all the features I needed according to the feature specification. So, this time, I actually read the installation instructions and found that:

1) You should really use the jad file they supply the program with. Then you will be able to grant permissions for tasks once and for all, or deny them (as in my case for network access).

2) You should really create a set of atlases / maps for the regions you are interested in. There is a Java application for this that is really simple to use and just gets the maps, to the zoom levels you want, from Google Maps (https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=238075&package_id=289357). Fantastically easy! Just set a default map /atlas and then you are off. For my trip to germany, I just created a set for Franfurt and Würzburg, and now I will be able to see my position and direction directly in the map (without having to have network access). Brilliant!

3) You should really download a CMS (sort of a custom set of panels). Very handy.

4) You should discover that, atleast on the P1i, most of the handling is done through pressing regions on the screen. Extremely simple to use, once you notice this :-)

In the flood of useless applications, especially for mobile phones I think, it is sooo nice to find one that is really great. Ok, there are a couple of things that should be taken care of (like more graceful handling of missing maps, maps in an erroneous format or accessing of the GPS when permission was NOT given) but that is separate issue. On the whole TrekBuddy is a brilliant example that mobile phone applications can be useful and well designed. So, now there are two of them TrekBuddy and HandySafe :-)