Notices

Hello,

First of all, let me congratulate the author for this excellent application. It is a "must have", specially with a n810 (which I happily own).

I recently tried the "Download route" feature and found it very useful. I noticed however that the driving instructions were given in englsh. This is not a problem to me, but being a perfeccionist person I did a little research in order to have these instruction in my native language (spanish).

I noticed that the driving instruction are downloaded from http://gnuite.com:8080/cgi-bin/gpx.cgi which apparently is a front-end which use googlemaps for obtaining these instructions and convert them to gpx format. I noticed that the cgi script allows for changing the domain used, which by default is ".com". I changed it to ".es", and the instructions are now in spanish. So, it is only matter of adding the string "&tld=es" to the URL in maemo-mapper's "Route download" dialog box.

However, I noticed that a few words in the driving instructions remain in english. For example, after each instruction, there is a text announcing the distance to the next instruction. This is in englisn ("Go 2,2 kilometers"). Also, the final instruction is in english ("Arrive at ..."). I guess that these texts were not provided by google, but added by the cgi script which did the conversion.

My suggestion is to internationalize the script, so that the tld parameter not only affects the domain used, but also the language in which this additional text is generated (did I mention that I am a perfeccionist?). Also, it would be useful to have this option accesible from the maemo-mapper's dialog, without have to "hack" the url.

I offer myself to provide the neccesary translations for Spanish language.

Additionally... is the gpx.cgi script source code available? If so, I could install my own server, and do all kinds of experiments with it, in order to provide more "gps friendly" instructions. For example, gpx could contain advanced warnings and actual instruccions, like other navigators do, as for example: "In the next traffic circle, take the 1st exit", and later "Take the 1st exit now". There are lots of possibilities if we could parse the instructions given by google at a higher level.

If this is what I think it is, downloading a route from google maps (or whatever it is), I found it most interesting that it could not find addresses that were at least 20 years old. Yes, they are valid addresses and I have been to them :-(.

Sadly, easier to use the Garmin stuff, even the old CD that I have finds those addresses [Grrrrr] :-/. Plus having downloaded the maps into the Garmin GPS, I can route on the device.

Yes, as you noted, you can get Spanish directions by simply append "tld=es" to the "Source URL" field. "tld" stands for "top-level domain" (like "com" or "es" or "jp" or "fr"). The default is "com", but you can replace "es" with just about any top-level domain as you like.

Obviously, it would be nice for me to better incorporate this into Maemo Mapper, and I've been meaning to do that for a while, but I've been busy. Internationalizing the web services is something I hadn't thought of, though.

Thanks for the feedback.