RouteBuddy is a new GPS and mapping program of Mac OS X. It looks really slick, with a nice interface. They even promote the use for in-car navigation and mapping.

It’s a little expensive, at $100, plus about $50 for each set of maps you want to buy for it. It seems like for $100, you should at least get 1 set of maps for free to start. This kind of pricing isn’t really aimed towards a hobbyist or someone who just wants to ‘play around’ with maps.

There are numerous other mapping solutions for the Mac, none with as smooth an interface, but run much cheaper with similar functionality. Here is a quick list as well as their own blurb and pricing.

USGS Topo!

View any point on the topographic map in 3D or draw a route and see a 3D fly thru of your route. $60

GPSUtility

GPSUtility displays GPS data including speed, bearing, position and satellite information. Free

GPSy

connects your Macintosh to a broad range of Global Positioning System (GPS) navigational units and has advanced mapping, logging, and data transfer features. $50

TrueNav GPS and Go

Expand your digital hub by connecting global positioning system (GPS) devices. Experience the wealth of information that GPS devices are able to provide to your Macintosh. Include location information with your data. $50

MacEnc (by GPSNavX)

charting and navigation application that allows the use of the free NOAA S-57 ENC marine charts on your Mac. $99.95

GPSRouteX

auto-sequencing GPS route navigation application for Mac OS X. Full support for GPSd, import/export Google Earth KML files, import/export GPX files, create your own routes and waypoints, even use your laptop with Google Earth driving directions to give you spoken, “turn-by-turn” driving directions! For a more complete description, check out the feature list.$29

GPSNavX

for the boater that wants to take the Macintosh aboard for real-time display of position on full color marine Softcharts and BSB raster charts.$60

Mac GPSPro

transferring Waypoints, Routes, Tracklogs, and GPS satellite Almanacs. MacGPS Pro works with almost all brands of GPS receivers for a real-time display of GPS information on a moving map on the Macintosh screen. It allows import of maps from a wide variety of sources. These maps can be viewed with no GPS receiver connected, or used in real-time as a moving-map display of your current position and velocity. $50

TopoDraw

allows you to draw new waypoints and tracks directly onto a 2D map simply by pointing and clicking. You can also use TopoDraw to present navigation data gathered with your Garmin GPS unit on a 2D map.$12.95

Route66

contains more than 6,500,000 streets in the US & Canada, ROUTE 66 Route USA 2004 contains no less than 4,000,000 Points of Interest in over 60 categories like hotels, restaurants and petrol stations, most of which together with their addresses and telephone numbers. What is more, ROUTE 66 Route USA 2004 also provides support for GPS, enabling you to establish your exact location using satellite navigation and ensuring that you will never lose your way again.$40

TerraBrowser

Terrabrowser is an internet browser for satellite photos and topographical maps which are obtained from the Microsoft Terra Server. $15

RoadNav

Roadnav is an in-car navigation system that can run on a variety of operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Roadnav can obtain a car’s present location from a GPS unit, plot street maps of the area, and provide verbal turn by turn directions to any location in the USA. Roadnav uses the free TIGER/Line files from the US Census Bureau to build the maps, along with the GNIS state and topical gazetteer data from the USGS to identify locations. Free

Trail Runner X

TrailRunner is a route planning software for all kinds of long distance sports like running, biking, hiking, inline-skating, skiing and more, with geographic display of your workout area. Exports to cellphone or iPod Nano. Free

There are also some nice frameworks and utilities for working with GPS:

MacGPSBabel

utility for converting between GPS formats

FourCoordinates

Cocoa Framework for interfacing with GPS devices

GPSd

daemon that allows multiple connections to a GPS unit, GPSdX is a Mac-specific version

NoSweat

interface to the Garmin Forerunner

gps2gpe

GPS to GoogleEarth converter

LoadMyTracks

LoadMyTracks downloads Tracks, Routes, and Waypoints from GPS receivers (including those from Garmin, Magellan, and Timex) to your Macintosh. From these, it can create GPX files (for use in software that understands GPS output) or KML files (for use with Google Earth and Google Maps).

I’ll try and do an overall review of the various applications later.

Publishing technology books, especially related to any online tools or programming languages is a very fast paced, and dangerous, situation. Books take years to produce, write, publish, and distribute. More than likely, if you started writing a book on the newest technology now, it wouldn’t be out until mid-late 2007. During this time, the tool or language you are writing about will be in a new version, used in new ways, and be sitting next to 5.4 x 10^6 books on the same subject on the bookstore/library shelf.

Magazines deal with this problem by publishing on a month-to-month basis. But an article can still take several months to publish and is limited to several pages, at most, in length. Not enough to cover an entire language/tool.

The answer, currently, is to publish online, early-editions of your books. Push them to excited “beta” (so Web2.0) customers who are willing to pay for up-front copies, and give feedback to the publisher. This is similar to a beta program for the commercial Operating Systems. Developers want information now.

Pragmatic Programmers Beta Books was the first of this genre that I am personally aware of. You can purchase the PDF version of the book now, and get updates for the lifetime of the book. They are currently offering Rails Recipes and Pragmatic Ajax: a Web2.0 primer ($20.00 pdf/$37.45 both)

Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) (did I just hear Beaker?) is offering Ruby for Rails: Ruby techniques for Rails developers ($22.50 pdf/$44.95 both), which looks like quite the tome, at 600 pages. This seems like an extra reason to get a veritably 0g digital copy.

O’Reilly Rough Cuts, is a bandwagon jumper. They already offer all of their books in online format via their ‘Safari’ service, but charge extra now for their version of the beta books. In addition, it appears that when you pay for the beta book, you only get access to it until it is published. You then have to buy the full copy when it is released. They are offering a Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and Flickr books.

I like the idea of getting access to books now, rather than waiting for eventual, and typically belated, publication. By using a digital, ‘published’ book, I can use a more trusted resource than your various flavors of search engine (and often tainted responses - which tend to propagate bad coding practices). I don’t have to keep an aging, dead-tree copy of a v1.0 (or 2.0) book on my shelf and look at it years later and laugh at how out-of-date that language/tool is now (you go with your BASIC and setting up the TRS-80 books).

As per one of my New Year’s resolutions (as most resolutions occur, after months and months of your conscious constantly pinging you on the matter), I am looking at bug-tracking software.

I would like something simple, web-based, but complete. I want to allow guests and new people to register and file bugs, track the progress of bugs, search through bugs/feature requests/solutions. Some of the projects are open-source, so it would be great to refer to/link the actual source, but there are also some closed-source (but free) projects.

Here’s a quick summary of what I see are 4 big players, actively supported bug-tracking systems out there. I’ve left out Sourceforge.net and Berlios since those are clunky, very advertising heavy, and typically also host the projects. I want to host my projects. And GForge (or whatever the open-source version is now called) is not a good solution.

Flyspray meets the simple category. I’ve used up to v0.97, and v0.99 is currently out, but I haven’t tried it. The interface features most things a bug-tracker should, multiple projects, categories, comments, related tasks, assigning etc. But when I first “walk-in” it doesn’t give me a quick run-down of all my assigned tasks, new tasks, etc. I know there are bugs in there, it’s just not really up-front about it.

Trac is a Subversion styled version of CVSTrac, and *much* nicer. It includes tickets, a wiki, and source browsing. All of these great features. The problems are: 1) setup is insane. I’ve spent about 8 hours on it, got it to finally run on a port when running the tracd daemon, but can’t set it up through a shared host and apache to just serve up, and 2) administration is via files. So it’s not the easiest to add new components, versions. etc. Apparently you can get professionally hosted trac installations.

Manstis Bug Tracking has a clean interface, very good “entry-point” where I can view all of my current bugs, new bugs, bugs by version, etc. No source browsing/linking however.

Atlassian’s Jira was recommended by independent devs at Evening at the Adler. I can say it looks very nice, is professionally supported and developed (and therefore costs $$ for closed-source projects). However, there are free licenses for open-source/community projects. It runs Java, and on a shared host, I can’t get past the 99% CPU usage on loading. My hosting company kills the process after about 1.5 seconds of that nonsense. Support must be from overseas and is sporadic, because the emails come in the middle-of-the-night and they haven’t really understood or resolved me issue.

So, to summarize, there are some very good options in all 4 of those projects. I am currently {attempting to setup, using, about given up on} each of those projects. I would like to use Trac, but am really banging my head on getting it setup and configured. Jira is all cool, but it’s proprietary (more power to them - looks like a good product), but I can’t mod anything and I don’t think it plays well on shared hosts.