February 1, 2009

Mini Map Update

In my last blog post, I talked about a cool little FireFox add-on called Mini Map. I also mentioned that it was a great application, but that the GPX file import functionality did not seem to work.

Well, this past week, I had some nice exchanges with Mini Map's application developer, and I'm happy to report that he fixed the program so you can now import GPX files; just like those that come from geocaching.com in the form of a pocket query. In fact, if you unzip a pocket query, you will notice that it contains one or two GPX formatted files, which contain all the geocache information that gets loaded onto your GPS (and PDA) device.

So for example, after unzipping my Mt. Diablo Caches pocket query, I was able to successfully load the GPX file using Mini Map's GPX import tool:

With Mini Map, you have several map background options to choose from. I used Google Maps Terrain view in the above example. You can see that Mini Map displays the cache locations from my pocket query as blue icons, and clicking on any of these brings up a call-out box with the cache information as well as a link to the cache page on geocaching.com.

It's a pretty handy little tool and very easy to use with an impressive variety of options. Give it a try if you have a chance.

Happy Caching!

4 comments:

P.J. said...

Highly interesting. So basically you can really get a good view of everything you want to do -- or even have done -- with this setup?

A \'lil HooHaa

GeoJoe said...

Exactly, P.J. And there are so many different options. Check out the youtube video in my previous post for a real good overview.

Just John said...

Ok; this is really neat. The fact that it will handshake with geocaching.com (somewhat) is a huge selling point. Thanks for the tip.

Chris said...

Great tip! Installing the add-on now to give it a go.