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Has something changed recently with track recording? It's been a little while since I recorded a track (since testing of the calibrated map overlay), but yesterday and today I recorded a couple of new tracks. The points on the tracks are very far apart, even though I have my intervals set to 5m and 2s, and the GPS to 0s (these are the same settings as the last time I recorded a track; I have not changed anything).

In 1.9.2, if I try to add a POI using the right panel button the POI edit scree comes up OK, but then when I select "OK" it says "working" very briefly, and then I'm back in the POI edit screen again. The only way out of the edit screen is "Cancel". The point has not been saved, even if "OK" was selected before "Cancel".

If I try and save my preferences in Locus Pro I get the message "Process Unsuccessful". If I try and load preferences I get "Locus Free Settings". I uninstalled Locus Free though, to see if it solved the disappearing widget mystery (see //http://forum.asamm.cz/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=782&p=4597&hilit=widget#p4597). I expect I could fix these problems by uninstalling and reinstalling Locus Pro, but I would really like to save my preferences before doing that! Is there any possible solution?

I created a category called "CA peaks", and then tried to rename it to "CA Peaks", and I get "Unexpected problem". Even exiting and restarting Locus does not fix this. I can rename it to "CA peakss" though. I get the same error if I try to rename "CA Peaks" to "cA peaks". And, if I try to rename "CA Peaks" to "cCA Peaks" the POI category just disappears, with no error message  

Not that big a deal (especially at this point, since I have not imported any POIs into the category), but I thought I would report it.

I find the augmented reality view very useful sometimes. Especially now we can altitude data to the POIs; that was a very nice improvement. I think there are a couple of things that would make it more useful though.

1) I find it very hard to see the radar sometimes. It would be nice if we could change the color of this so that it shows up better against light backgrounds.

2) It would be very useful if the distance to the highlighted POI were shown on the screen (only the highlighted one in the center of the screen, not all of them). Sometimes I would just like to know how far away it is, but at other times it would really help to discriminate two features that are almost in line with each other. If I can see the distance it would be clear, for example, that mount X (4.5km)  must be the one in front of mount Y (6.3km). Maybe other information might be useful too, such as bearing, elevation difference to current location, etc, but for me distance would be the most useful.

In previously recorded tracks the information includes two times and two speeds: "All", and "Speed > 0". The times and speeds are usually different, because of stops along the way. But today I recorded a track and it says "All" and "Speed" (so the second column heading has changed), and the speeds and times are identical. That shouldn't be the case, because I stopped for lunch. One thing I have changed is that I turned on "Record only whilst moving". Is this the reason for the difference (although I don't see why that should change the second column heading)?

1) If I edit a POI and change the category the POI icon changes to the new category icon. That's fine. If I then choose to override the category icon it shows the new icon in the editor. But when I exit the editor the icon I get is the new category icon. If I want to change the category and override the new category icon I have to edit the POI twice.

2). This might be more of a wish that a bug. If the icons for two POIs overlap, of course one must be on top. But if I hover on the one that is in the background it is not forced to be on top, so I can't see the icon. The text can also stay behind another icon too, which make it very hard to read! Could you force a POI icon that has the focus to be on top of all the others?

I don't know if other people have the same problem, but in bright sunlight I find it very hard to tell if the track recording is turned on. I have an AMOLED screen so the contrast in bright sunlight is not great, and the relatively small difference between the black and gray backgrounds can make it very hard to tell. I often just start moving, and see if a track appears. I much prefer the black vs orange color scheme used for the icons such as "rotate map". Would it be possible to change the color scheme to something with more contrast between the on and off states?

There is a very large database of POIs here:
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/

The problem is converting them to something Locus can use. There may be commercial software out there that can do all the necessary steps, but I could not find any free software that can do all of them. To save anyone else from wasting time, I tried POIEdit 2007, GPS Babel, KML Builder, GPS Utility, and Extra POI editor. Although none of them can do all the steps, you can do all the steps using the first two: POIEdit 2007 and GPS Babel.

1) First you need to get the Cloudmade file you are interested in. Get the Tomtom files, because POIEdit 2007 was clearly written by someone for which this format is the priority. It will read the gpx files, but it will do it more slowly and it will not save correctly in either gpx or kml formats (it will not even load the resulting files itself!).

2) Load one of the files into POIEdit 2007. If the file is large this takes a realllllllllllly long time! You have to be very patient! Note that the Tomtom files load faster than the gpx files!

3) When the file has loaded you can click on the top of the description column, and it will sort by name. If there is a very large number of POIs this can take a long time! You can now Ctrl or Shft select all the POIs you do not want and delete them by hitting the Del key. If there is a very large number of POIs this can also take a long time! Save the remaining POIs in Tomtom format (not kml or gpx!). This is the only piece of free software I could find that will allow you to sort by name and then select and delete large numbers of POIs in one step. Because of the speed issues with large files I found it useful to first delete everything that I knew I had no use for, and then save that as a new starting point.

4) When you have finished extracting all the categories you are interested in, copy all the Tomtom files from one folder into another. Fire up a command prompt and change all the extensions from ov2 to either kml or gpx (whatever your final format will be). This might seem like a strange thing to do, but you will see why in step 6:

5) Launch GPS Babel.  Select the starting format as "TomTom POI File (.ov2)". Click on FileNames and select the POI file or files you want to convert. Note that if you select multiple files you do NOT have the option of converting them to multiple files! They will all be put into one output file!

6) For the output format select either "GPX XML" or "Google Earth (Keyhole) Markup Language". I personally use kml because then I can easily check what I have in Google Earth. Now click on the button that says "File Name" and select the corresponding gpx or kml file that you renamed in step 4. Do not be tempted to just type the name! I did not try typing the entire path and name from scratch, but if you have a path and name, say "c:temppeaks.kml", and you edit the name to be, say, "c:tempbuildings.kml", it will not create "c:tempbuildings.kml"! What it will do is overwrite the "c:temppeaks.kml" file! So you need to actually select a file and then overwrite it. This seems so ridiculous that I keep thinking I must have missed something, but if I did it's not obvious.

7) Once you have selected the file and told it that yes, overwriting is OK, click on the "Apply" button.

You will need to repeat the input file selection, out put file selection, and "Apply" steps for each output file you want to create.

You are done! Now you just have to import them to Locus. If you extracted a lot of categories in the steps above this is also rather tedious  

These also came from here:
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/

The license for these is the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 License, so it is legitimate to redistribute these as long as the license terms are stated. The full terms are here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

There is a very large database of POIs here:
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/

The license for these is the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 License, so it is legitimate to redistribute these as long as the license terms are stated. The full terms are here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

I did not extract every category for the MA, or NH.  Some of them are too incomplete to be worth bothering with, and others are just not interesting to me. It's worth noting that the peaks seem to be very complete though, and accurate.

The process to get these split out into gpx or kml files is kind of tedious, and not obvious. I'll post the procedure in another thread so if someone wants other data they don't have to go through everything I went through to get it.

I have been creating some POI categories using the POI data from here:
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/
Since they are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 License I'll post them here if I can ever get them ported properly. Porting them over to Locus is proving to be a real PITA though, although that mostly has little to do with Locus. When I eventually get all the pieces together I'll post the procedure I use for porting them too, since it's taken a lot of effort to figure it out.

Unfortunately, my latest hurdle does look like it's a Locus problem. To start at the beginning, I imported one of the gpx files taken directly from the Cloudmade site into Locus, which worked fine. It gave me over 12000 POIs though, most of which I don't care about. So then I used a couple of pieces of software to break the POIs down into smaller categories (which has been a very painful process!). Anyway, I have split out files in both gpx and kml formats. So I deleted the existing category with it's 12000+ POIs, and recreated it. Then I tried to import the attached gpx file, but it says "0 points imported". So I converted the file to kml. When I try to import the kml file the first thing it tells me is that I already have a point by that name (Gun Hill), which is strange since I deleted the entire POI category. I guess Locus has some information about the POIs held somewhere else. I told it to overwrite the point, and apply that to all points, and it imports 1726 points. But when I look in the POI category, there are only 1291 points. There really are missing valid points too. For example, if you load the kml file into Google Earth and search for "long hill, nashua", you will find a POI. But that POI is missing in Locus.

Any help or pointers about how to get past this latest problem would be much appreciated.

I am seeing some very weird behavior with guiding too, but I'll save that for later