Mobile Trail Explorer
Ever since I bought the first GPS unit I wanted to be able to record my biking trips and other activities so that I could explore them afterwards on my computer. I couldn’t stop myself from coding this app when I finally acquired Nokia N80 that supported both Bluetooth connections (JSR 82) forreading GPS locations and File connection (JSR 75) for storing recorded trails on a memory card.
The hard part was to get the bluetooth connection to work properly. After I upgraded the firware on my N80 to latest version (v4.0623.0.41) I was able to connect and communicate with the bluetooth device without problems. I’m using the Nokia LD-3W as a GPS unit and it works quite well for my needs.
Currently the application can display current location as latitude and longitude and it can draw a current trail. User can store interesting locations as waypoints that are also drawn on the same canvas. Here is a screenshot from my Nokia N80 and the same trail exported to Google Earth. As you can see the main trail view is very clean and simple :)
More screenshots and download links on the Mobile Trail Explorer page. I’m looking forward on your ideas for future improvements. Please leave a comment if you are able to try it out on any other phone models. I haven’t tried how the main screen works with devices with lower resolution, like older Series 60 phones.
The source code is released under the GPL license. Downloadable package includes the project files for the NetBeans IDE 5.5. I’ve been using the latest NetBeans IDE 5.5 RC1 which seems to be rock solid.