Geopaparazzi 4.1.0 is out: beam it to me!

Well, as sad as I am that Geopaparazzi 4.1.0 doesn't support Android versions before 4.1, it was definitely time to move on from version 2.3. For those with older devices version 3 of geopaparazzi will hopefully work.

This gave me finally the possibility to do something I dream of since watching Star Trek as a kid: BEAMING!!!

So this will be presented as feature number one for this new version. :-D

1) Beaming of gps logs between devices

Assume you are on a survey and your battery is dying. Assume you have a second device you can use with full battery. You need to send the data over in order to continue your project there.

Well, one version is to somehow share your project database through wifi (if available) or connecting to a pc.

Well, now you have a much quicker way, even if for now only for gps tracks (and only if your phone supports NFC).

Make sure NFC is activated and follow this short howto:

Isn't that incredibly cool? :-)

2) Share your current position

Well, lately one thing made me very upset. My mother, which uses geopaparazzi when she goes hiking, used to share her position through the SMS function (the one available from the panic view). She recently upgraded her mobile plan with internet connection and started to share her position through telegram instead:

Do you see the problems? First, at least family has to stick together and she has to use geopaparazzi to share her position :-) and second I can't have her using Google Maps instead of Openstreetmaps to show me were she is. It simply doesn't work.

So I removed the send data via sms function, which was quite experimental and not used and added the Share Position function, which is now available in the maps view menu:

This will take you to the usual android sharing screen and if you select for example telegram, the OSM link to the position + marker will be sent:

And the link will bring you to:

3) Spanish localization

I am very happy to welcome on board a new translator for Spanish. That translation has been unmaintained in the last years, so I am very happy this important language is supported properly!


4) Bugfixes

Apart of the two above features, some last minute bugfixes went in:

• zoom to track start/end not working
• crash with enquiry on Spatialite layer with null attribute
• GPX exports only node

As usual you will have to wait until google play throws out the version.

Enjoy and beam!!!

geopaparazzi 3.9.5 is out

This is mostly a bugfix release, but has one important addition, that sneaked in: the scaling of OSM online tiles on high resolution devices.

In the following image you can see the OSM tiles in geopaparazzi on a Nexus 5. The left image is from when we were not handling the scaling, and it is impossible to read the labels. The right one instead is scaled.

Advantage: you can read it.
Disadvantage: the image is scaled and therefore not as smooth as the original.

This can be enabled in the screen settings:

A bug that was keeping new map or mapurl tile sources to not being displayed in the treeview, brought us to the choice to simplify the tiles tree viewer. It has now only 2 levels, one of which represents the folder and the other the tile sources.
Filter buttons help to simplify searching on the source type:

Everything else has been mostly around enhancing the GPS system and fix the tile system that in the last release was giving problems on:

• position on map wrong due to map bounds
• move to bookmark not working
• center on gps not working

Last but not least I am happy to welcome the Polish localization.
This brings us to 17 languages, of which 13 quite well supported. As usual, if you want to help out, this is the place.

Geopaparazzi 2.6.0 is out - OSM, Mixare and GeoSMS

[for an Italian version of this article, click here]

We just released Geopaparazzi 2.6.0 to the market.

I was really looking forward to this release because it contains a ton of new stuff some were expecting. Let's try to see some of it.

1) Openstreetmap support

This is likely the most important change for this version. We now have the possibility to create OSM points of interest and synchronize them with the OSM accoutn online.

First one has to activate OSM support in the preferences:

If OSM support is activated, once geopaparazzi restarts, the user is prompted to download the OSM tags. This is a library of symbols and definitions of OSM tags.

The map view will then prefsent a small OSM-logo handle at the right side of the map. If that one is pulled, it shows the OSM categories available.

Entering one of the category, the various tags are presented:

And when selected, the user gets the form with the definition of the selected tag. Once filled out and pressed ok at the bottom of the form, the point is saved and kept ready for upload to OSM.

From the categories view one can upload the OSM points to his account. The application just askes for a description for the changeset it is going to upload.

If the user and password were inserted properly in the preferences, geopaparazzi will connect to a WPS service written and made available by Luca Delucchi. The WPS will take care to upload the points to the defined OSM account. A big thanks goes to Luca, who helped me to understand the necessary OSM internals. He alos wrote the actual WPS service, made it available for all geopaparazzi users and also prepared the OSM tags library.

2) OGC GeoSMS support

This version has support for the recently released OGC GeoSMS specification. This works in two ways: for sending geosms, but also for incoming geosms.

The sms preferences allow to "enable sms catcher", which will handle incoming geosms, while the panic number is instead the number that will be used to send geosms to.

Let's start with outgoing geosms'. Geopaparazzi has the bottom "panic" bar. From there a user can send a panic message, which will send to the configured number a geosms containing the positions following OGC specs and a message asking for help. There is a second button that can be used to send a customized geosms. It will ask the user for a cutom text to add to the location definition.

What happens instead when a GeoSMS is recieved? If the catcher is enabled in the settings, geopaparazzi will parse the incoming message and recognize the GeoSMS format. It will notify the user that such a message has arrived:

The notification makes it then possible to open the GeoSMS with one of the available applications on the phone, that can handle the position information.

So once selected the notification:

And opening it for example with a well know application we can see that I was preparing some screenshots for my talk at the Italian GRASS and GFOSS user meeting in Trieste:

3) augmented reality with mixare

In this version we added the ability to view all points of interest contained in the current geopaparazzi view in mixare. I already described the feature in this post.
The entry point is the menu in the map view:

4) create a new project

While this has been a bit odd in the past, it now follows a more natural workflow. You are asked for the name of the new project and geopaparazzi creates the project and loads it.

5) bookmarks

One this I was missing, was a very easy way to add bookmarks to geopaparazzi. So we added a check on the presence of a bookmarks.csv file in the project folder (by default geopaprazzi). If the file is there and it contains points in the form:

Hotel Trieste, 45.642043,13.780791
Grassday Trieste,45.65844,13.79320

those points will be loaded in the application and appear in the bookmarks list.

This feature lead me to have a ton of bookmarks and defined the need for a way to filter them. So the bookmarks list now has a textfield that filters the bookmarks by name:

6) center on gps

After having risked to make car accidents just to pan while driving in order to have the actual position visible, we added a function to have the gps alwasy inside the current window, through automatic panning. It can be switched on in the gps preferences:

7) enhanced charting with zoom to markers

Just to remind that one, I wrote already here about it.


8) osmdroid doesn't kill tiles any more

Some developers from the osmdroid (the engine we use to display the maps) community finally solved the bug that in certain low memory conditions were killing all the OSM tiles, leaving the user with no more maps. This was one of the worst bugs ever, since it had happend to several user that they found themself out in the field with no network and no more maps. This has now finally been solved!!!

9) possibility to use network based position

This was asked by several users so we thought we could add it. In the setting it is now possible to ask geopaparazzi to use network based position definition instead of GPS based. Even if I do not like it that much, I agree that it is handy sometimes.

Moving a little step closer to OSM

It is a while that I wanted to create some tools to support Openstreetmap in BeeGIS in order to be able to upload digitalized field data to OSM.

Well, a little step was done now, which is a shapefile to osm exporter. As so often happens I didn't do anything great here, but I used to magnificent powers of open source and borrowed it from Ian Dees shp-to-osm project which luckily is written in java.

How to use it? It is wrapped together with dxf, dwg and kml import in the vector import/export plugin, which can be found here with installation instruction.

The rest is easy.

1) assume I have 3 layers of Points, MultiLines and MultiPolygons



2) File -> export -> Openstreetmap export



3) Choose the shapefile, and output folder



A bunch of osm files will be created in the output folder.

4) Open JOSM and import them



Since they are just points, you won't see that much, right?




But if I do the same with the line and polygon layer and then import all the osm files created, it looks prettier:




Next will be do the export directly from feature layer, which could be backed by any datastore, shapefile, postgis or whatever.