[zeppelinfromled]

I’ve been experimenting on this website called motowhere.com that lets you map out your rides. Here is a link to a ride that I did last week: http://www.motowhere.com/maps/route/12729 .

It took me a little bit to get good with the program, but it’s a cool way to keep track of rides that you like and to share them with friends. It also tells you how far the ride is. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but it’s probably pretty good.

[eternal05]

It’s great to see the creative things people do with public web APIs, and of all the APIs out there, G. Maps has got to be one of the most creativity-prone. Cool site!

[eon]

I’ve been playing with this and I think I like it. Haven’t created many routes yet but did run into trouble trying to undo the last point I added. Unless there is a way to fix that that could be a deal breaker. I was able to get someone elses route to my GPS as a route (through using GPSTracker) which was cool. I love planning my routes on gmaps but hate having to reproduce the route on the archaic Garmin software.
Need to play with this some more but so far it looks promising.

[zeppelinfromled]

To undo a point, you have to click the undo button a whole bunch of times. It considers every little curve to be a point, even if you didn’t click for each of them. That’s definitely one of its drawbacks though.

[Elias]

wow, that was frustrating! I can’t believe how many times it screws up. It eventually plots so many damn points (that you don’t even ask it to plot), and reaches it’s limit of “follow roads” points, and just starts plotting them as the crow flies. And apparently I also make a LOT of U-turns map doesn’t refresh well either…ugh…AMAZING idea, terrible execution…i’m interested to see if they improve it ever. thanks for pointing it out!

[eon]

I’m not quite sure why that app works the way it does. The standard google map is a lot easier to plot routes with and it lets you share the route. I assume it is plotting all those points to allow you to save out GPX files, something google does not allow you to do. But I have done some searching and found another app that does a much better job with that part. I have converted a large 1000 mile route and a small local twisty route from google maps to GPS routes and it does a pretty good job at it. It only creates a minimal amount of waypoints (not 1000s like motowhere) and actually exports it as a route, not a track. So I can paste the route straight into my GPS mapping software and review it.

So far I have only found one small issue where it places two waypoints close together when you have to make a turn and the route then has you driving in circles trying to hit both waypoints. It does not happen very often and is easily fixed by deleting one of the waypoints. All in all I like this app. It allows me to plan my route using Google Maps where I can see the terrain, local photos etc and keep my use of the clunky MapSource program to a minimum.

[Author]

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