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Mine is still running OK. GPS is still on, it's still recording. Now more than 19 hours (although only 137 points). I have done a few other things to stress it a little (played a couple of games, etc), but nothing extreme. I'll continue to leave it recording, but if it hasn't crapped out by now I doubt it's going to.

10 hours, and it's still recording. I'll leave it recording overnight (although it's obviously not going to move, so it will not add any points until I get up tomorrow!).

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.

The same thing happened to me today. I have no app killer installed, and was not running anything that would use a lot of resources. I didn't even put Locus into the background, just turned the screen off. I turned the screen back on several times, and it looked fine, then at one point I tuned it on, and Locus was not there any more. And of course it had stopped recording. You seem to have figured out what the problem is, but in case it helps I have attached the error log. I notice that it is quite different to the one Auric posted.

As another note, I have also recently upgraded to Gingerbread.

I'm fighting with this mainly because my stats, more then 85% of users, use stolen version.

I thought the license was locked to the phone hardware.

Is only locus cause troubles with this or any other app also?

In my case, it would probably only be Locus. Maybe that's because Locus is one of the few apps I have been willing to pay for though    I used to use Rmaps, and then discovered Locus. Last time I was in Asia I had Rmaps and the free version of Locus installed, so I would not have seen this problem. After I got home I uninstalled Rmaps and upgraded to the paid version of Locus. It is by far the best offline mapping app for Android (I also have Aura installed, but I don't view that as a competing product; I use it for different things).

This is what GPSBabel offers for points:

[attachment=0:2afgyswn]Import Filters.gif[/attachment:2afgyswn]

Actually, the dialog is very confusing. The position and radius options do not refer to the duplicate location filter! They are relative to the latitude and longitude positions. I don't think any of that is necessary for the import on a phone. If this level of filtering is needed it would be better to export the POIs and filter them in GPSBabel. The duplicate location filter actually has no user settings, and will only consider a point to be a duplicate if the location is the same to 6 decimal places. IMHO, that is not very useful. What would be useful would be if I could set it so that points were considered to be the same if they were within a certain distance of each other, and had the same name. I realize that will slow down the import, but importing POIs is not something most people will do every day.

valid xml is file that starts with

Code Select Expand

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gpx


I wasn't aware that gpx was an XML format. I guess now I know  

And the export problem from GPSBabel was my mistake  :oops:  GPSBabel has so many formats I got the wrong one selected. I think the gpx will work if I choose the right options.

And about duplicate check. Locus check for duplicates in database and this means also files already imported from same file!

Yes, I realize that. That might lead to a problem though. Suppose I already have some points in a category. Then I import some more. Suppose some of the new ones are genuine duplicates of those that already exist (i.e. they have the same name and location), but the new POIs also contain points with duplicate names, but in different locations. How then to filter the import?

Hi,
  so let's fix this

when you import data, you get this "duplicate point" dialog even when points with same name are in imported file. If you want to import all points, you have to press "ignore" on all points, or disable "Duplicate points" checking in settings (which also speed up import a lot).

Yes, thanks. This is what I have now done. The only reason I chose to overwrite is because it warned me about a point with that name already existing. That seemed to happen immediately, so I assumed it was because it somehow still had knowledge of the previous POIs I installed. I realize now that it was just chance, and the message actually comes up at about point 37 (so there are points with duplicate names that happen to be very close to the start of the file).

About importing attached GPX file - if you look into GPX file in your file, this is not a valid GPX file. This is only some file with points on single lines, but not valid GPX file!!

I wouldn't know how to recognize a valid gpx file if it jumped up and bit me. It's whatever GPSBabel exports. I guess I'll stick to exporting kml  

Thanks for the help

I have figured out what is wrong with the kml import. Because it warned me about duplicate names I told it to overwrite, and apply that to all. Well, the kml file contains duplicate names, so it overwrote many of it's own entries! I still don't know why it gave me that warning though. I get the warning even if I delete the entire category beforehand and/or if I choose "empty selected category". As a suggestion, it would be nice to be able to filter the points not just by name, but also by location, with a used defined minimum distance. This is what GPSBabel does (which I used to create both the gpx and kml files).

I also still don't know why the gpx file does not work. Of course, that is not so important now that I have figured out how to import the kml files.

This issue is going to affect me too. I can sometimes be in Asia for a month at a time, during which time I do not permit data roaming (way too expensive!) and I rarely, if ever, have access to a WiFi hotspot. If it requires validation every two weeks then surely that is the maximum time I will get. If it validated the license 13 days before I got on the plane then I have only one day before it needs to validate again. Or does it not work that way?

Why is the validation even needed? Isn't the app locked to the phone anyway, so that copying it to another phone is not possible?

I forgot to mention something. After reading it in, I exported the kml file from Google Earth,  and that did not solve the problem.

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