Obviously there’s going to be a heap of geo stuff announced this week (and yes I am going to the Google Developers Day on Thursday) and I’ll leave commenting on each new thing to all the other blogs. However I find this interesting because I’m a bit of a Garmin fan and heck I’m a bit of a API fan too.
Garmin® Publishes API Library and Opens Communication Between Third Party Websites and Garmin GPS Devices, which is the usual blah blah stuff.
Yet, we have the Device Communications bit, which, once the user has downloaded the Garmin Plugin allows websites to pull and push data to a connected GPS unit, see ‘ere. This could go hand in hand with the announcement of the release of GeoPressMT Plugin, which allows you geotag blog posts and what-not. The theory goes that the Garmin Plugin could pick up the geotagging from the GeoPressMT Plugin and allow the user to download the location of the blogpost to a GPS unit.
The part I’m not so impressed about is the “cross-platform” part of this…
“Allow visitors, who have the free cross-platform/browser Garmin Communicator plugin installed on their computer to transfer waypoint, route, track log, fitness and map data between their Garmin device and your website.”
…which is cross-platform if you exclude the Mac (and linux etc.). Other than that, allowing any site to push or pull content to a Garmin device is undoubtedly cool.
Second is the announcement, but not release yet of the MotionBased Web Services API…
“Enable users to interact programmatically from your application or web site to MotionBased. The API returns MotionBased data in a form that can be easily integrated into an application or a web site.”
…whatever that means, as there’s no API documentation yet. I’m guessing … and by guessing I mean, hoping, that it allows a 3rd party website to get access to a user’s tracklogs from MotionBase and then, you know, do stuff with them.
I’m always looking for easier GPS device, tracklog, photo timestamp matching workflows, and pretty soon it looks like I should be able to build my own.
Filed under: geoblogging, gps, hardware
We really, really tried to get Mac support for the plugin ready for the Where conference and announcement, but to no avail. I suspect it will just be a few more weeks. I don’t know where Linux fits in the roadmap.