Garmin and Mac, GPS and Google Earth

Well, back on the 10th Jan Garmin announced that it's GPS software products would be compatible with mac computers by the end of 2006. I found a Garmin 'blog' site the other day here and asked them if their developers' Christmas bonus were dependent on that, as with only a few days to go it's doesn't look promising... Obviously the criticism didn't go down well as my post never materialised.

Searching the rest of their site I then found a later press release from 27th Jun 2006 which admitted that only one of GPS software products "Training Centre" would be up and running (pardon the pun) by the end of 2006 and further announcements would then follow regarding the release date of other Garmin GPS software.

Sorry guys, sounds like you paid lip service to mac users earlier in the year without having finalised a realistic project time-line; either that or just slacking off. As your site says, the Arizona office, where mac compatible software is being developed, "is also an ideal place for us to test and use Garmin devices while biking, hiking, and geocaching." Hmm, more time needed in the office maybe?

Anyhow. Garmin software will be overtaken by 3rd-party translation software fairly soon. Why do I say this? Two words, that should shake the fear of god into Garmin, Google Earth, which I'll call GE from now on to save my fingers. GE uses a simple code language to put points on Google's 3D globe of the earth that is already well stocked with satellite images, maps, roads etc and is all available for gratis after downloading a and installing a small program file. (As an aside Google managed to roll-out a mac version of GE within less than a year of the PC version becoming popular...) Google calls uses a language called KML (keyhole mark-up) to put points on the GE globe but this language uses XML convention grammar and files which can be edited in a simple text editor (if you haven't heard of XML then just pretend it is similar to HTML, used to write web-pages, if you haven't heard of HTML then you can give up now...). Googles explanation of KML can fe found here and if you haven't yet discovered GE then get the program from here.

I haven't done a huge search on the topic, but once you have GE on a mac you just need a program that will download points from your GPS and save them in kml format to see them in a glorious full-colour world. Up till now I've been using MacGPS Pro to do this, a program available for around 50 bucks here. So far this program gets data out of your GPS and into KMZ format for GE but has issues up-loading points saved from GE in KMZ format. (Don't worry, kmz files are only kml (and therefore xml) files in a compressed format, see my previous post for how to uncompress and examine them using Excel.)

So, the last step of the puzzle is how to get points out of GE and back into a GPS. I suspect there are copyright issues involved, storage of data in a digital medium etc etc that have slowed Google's development of this, or are they just being leaned on my the GPS manufactures who see their own market for selling digital mapping products vanish in a puff of smoke?