Qstarz BT1300S and Mac

I am really happy with my Qstarz BT1300S. It is small, light, very sensitive. It gets a signal in my pocket or in a bag quite easilly, sometimes also in my pocket inside of a house.. quite impressive.

Of course, Qstarz seems to be a compaby that thinks Windows is the only operating system out there, so support for Mac from them is non-existent.
Luckilly though, the CHIP used in the device is not unknown, so you can use the BT747 Java software for it. Neat program that works both as a J2SE and J2ME application, so you can use it both on you Mac and on you Java enabled phone. The java app is a Midlet, which unfortunately is not signed so you can expect to agree to lots of disk access, but other than that it seems to work just fine. The 2.0 beta of the program also supports uploading AGPS data to the device, which is quite neat!

The only problem I see with the program is that the part of running the app should maybe be cleaned up a bit, and also that the part of getting a track into the GUI for showing on the integrated OpenStreatmap map is very slow compared to conversion to GPX or KML /KMZ. Maybe something to work on... :-)

Cross-platform apps to save the day

Looking back at the rapid increase in Mac popularity in the recent years, It is easy to see that Apple did not do this alone. Ok, they provided the framework for rapid expansion by not locking itself up in closed protocols and a "let's reinvent (and patent) the wheel" mentality, but the major work has, and is, done by independent developers. Quite a few of these independent project are actually not the result of a process of developing software for Mac, but the result of a UNIX-centered or cross-platform development process. Look at Skype and VLC... the development of cross-platform framework (Qt, SQLite, ...) has brought us a surge of cross-platform applications, and this has benefited Apple in the work for Mac acceptance. Let's face it.. and let's hope that this will continue.

(See some of what is available at http://www.pure-mac.com/cross.html)