Notices

The more I use Maemo Mapper the more uses I find for it.
Today I was taking the bus to a place I had never been to before and didn't know exactly where to get off. I had already downloaded maps for the area and got a good GPS signal next to the window - and was able to get off at a stop really close to my destination

BUT. I am very confused when it comes to how to work with POI's in MM.

I have two 'needs' for POIs:

A) Geo-caching locations as POIs
When downloading .loc files from geocaching.com.
I know how to 'export' this .loc file to a .db file that I can import into MM. That works well.

B) Addresses I'm going to
Often I'm going to an address that is new to me and it would be great to be able to easily create a POI for that in MM.


Questions:
1) My understanding is that MM only uses ONE POI file (the one you define in the settings). When downloading more .loc files and converting them to .db files is there any way that these files can be combined? Right now I have to change the POI file every time I want to look up another geo-cache location. I'd love to have a POI file that contains a lot of them.

2) How on earth do I add an address as a POI? Or is that even the best way to do it? I don't need to create a route to it...I just need a 'pin' on the map I can have the map 'go to' like you 'go to nearest POI'.
Plus: Same question here: If I want to ADD a new POI/address how do I do that without losing the existing ones?

Thanks in advance!

I haven't spent much time with POI's. I save the GPX files for routes to an addresses. When selecting a route and showing it, green line, you can see where you are relative to the route and where your end address is. That works for me.

If you have a program or a script to convert "loc" files to something Maemo Mapper can read, technically the same thing should be able to add those POIs to existing database.

POIs are just saved coordiantes with some additional information such as name and category. If you want to add an address as a POI, I'll have to tap-and-hold on the location, optionally replace the coordinates, and set a label. Keeping old POIs isn't an issue, because Maemo Mapper simply adds the POI to existing database. Also see my answer to question 1.

Personally I have some 1000 POIs in the database and I manage them with a Perl script running on my workstation.

1) I haven't tried it, but this should work. If you export the .db from gpxview, and then load it into Maemo Mapper like your doing, go into the Browse POI menu option and export all your selected POI's from your .db file to a .gpx file. Then, switch the Maemo Mapper POI database back to your default, choose Import POI and choose the .gpx file you just saved. Kind of roundabout, but it should work. I was going to do that, but I just manually added my geocache poi's. I may still try this method, depends which one is faster.

2) This is how you manually add any POI, whether it's an address, geocache, gas station etc.

Click and hold on the map with your finger (or stylus for more precise selection). Go to Tap Point > Add POI....
This will pop up a dialog to add the POI. The Lat and Long coords will already be set by where you clicked and held, you can then give the POI a name, select the category (which will help with either an icon or to find it easier) and you can write a description.
When you tap on the POI after its created, the info box will show the name and the category. To view the description, you'll have to tap and hold on the POI, choose POI > View/Edit...

Hmm I've noticed that POI downloads from within MaemoMapper is kinda broken. To see, you can try to download some POI within MM and click edit on the newly downloaded ones. Their long lat coordinates are 0,0

Update:

Exporting the .db into Maemo Mapper and then Exporting and Importing a .gpx file is extremely quick and easy. It positions the POI in the correct place, names it, and puts the geocache code in the description so you can easily search for it.

I can confirm this. Furthermore, I accessed the website, which is used by maemo-mapper to download POIs by a browser and found according 0 values for long/lat in the resulting XML files. Seems to me, that the google/mm-xml converter by gnuite fails in this point starting a few days ago.

Didn't have time to analyze the problem any further yet, but I believe that google changed some format to something gnuite's cgi can't handle yet.

there are some instructions on here for converting a csv file to format for maemo mapper POI using a software tool. I used it before and it worked fine. It is a little finicky about the formatting of the csv file but got it OK after a few tries. Search the threads.

I am pretty sure from my experience you can add multiple files in the directory where mapper looks for POIs.

I'll have to look into that, managing POIs through Maemo Mapper is just annoying (as well as downloading new POIs from there now with the 0,0 coordinates).

Did you report this problem to the author?