+shacker Posted July 18, 2007 Share Posted July 18, 2007 Hi all - I'm a Mac user and have wanted to start doing paperless caching. I have an iPod, and no PDA. The iPod has a "Notes" feature I thought would be perfect for paperless caching, but I couldn't find any software to convert both individual and Pocket Query .gpx files to plain text for use with iPod Notes. So I wrote a script to do it. It's working great for me, but I'd love to hear feedback from others. Get it here: http://birdhouse.org/software/gpx2txt.zip (v0.2) The big limitation right now is that it relies on the csplit command, which is limited to 99 splits. That means no Pocket Queries listing more than 99 caches. I hope to find a workaround for this in the future. Feedback welcome. - shacker Quote Link to comment
+geo climber Posted July 18, 2007 Share Posted July 18, 2007 GPSBabel also does this. Just export the .gpx file in Vcard format. Then drag and drop the Vcard into the iPod contacts folder. Works great although the screen on my Nano is pretty small. Quote Link to comment
+shacker Posted July 18, 2007 Author Share Posted July 18, 2007 (edited) geoclimber - Yes, this is a pretty cool feature in gpsbabel, but has a few problems: - The caches are mixed in with your existing contacts. I've got 500 contacts on my iPod, and it's really messy to stir a few hundred caches in amongst them. Yes, you could say this is true of Notes as well, but I don't keep many notes on my iPod (I don't suspect that many users do). - No log entries are shown - The user can't choose whether or not to encrypt the hints (not a big deal) So this script gets around those limitations (note gpx2txt also requires gpsbabel to operate). The gpsbabel vCard method does have the advantage of being available to Windows users as well, whereas this is a shell script and requires a Mac. Edited July 18, 2007 by shacker Quote Link to comment
+geo climber Posted July 18, 2007 Share Posted July 18, 2007 geoclimber - Yes, this is a pretty cool feature in gpsbabel, but has a few problems: - The caches are mixed in with your existing contacts. I've got 500 contacts on my iPod, and it's really messy to stir a few hundred caches in amongst them. Yes, you could say this is true of Notes as well, but I don't keep many notes on my iPod (I don't suspect that many users do). - No log entries are shown - The user can't choose whether or not to encrypt the hints (not a big deal) So this script gets around those limitations (note gpx2txt also requires gpsbabel to operate). The gpsbabel vCard method does have the advantage of being available to Windows users as well, whereas this is a shell script and requires a Mac. Got it. Now I see what you are doing. I didn't realize the contacts would be merged as I was only using the contacts for caching. Excellent on adding the logs, that's something I was wanting. I'll definitely try it out tomorrow. I should have read your README file before posting . Quote Link to comment
bcummings Posted August 2, 2007 Share Posted August 2, 2007 geoclimber - Yes, this is a pretty cool feature in gpsbabel, but has a few problems: - The caches are mixed in with your existing contacts. I've got 500 contacts on my iPod, and it's really messy to stir a few hundred caches in amongst them. Yes, you could say this is true of Notes as well, but I don't keep many notes on my iPod (I don't suspect that many users do). - No log entries are shown - The user can't choose whether or not to encrypt the hints (not a big deal) So this script gets around those limitations (note gpx2txt also requires gpsbabel to operate). The gpsbabel vCard method does have the advantage of being available to Windows users as well, whereas this is a shell script and requires a Mac. Your program is a shell script. I have cygwin installed which runs all maner of shell scripts very nicely. So its not a "mac only" option. or if a user has access to a linux or solaris account they can run the tool from there as well. Mac is unix and unix is mac, only with fewer features. Quote Link to comment
bcummings Posted August 2, 2007 Share Posted August 2, 2007 geoclimber - Yes, this is a pretty cool feature in gpsbabel, but has a few problems: - The caches are mixed in with your existing contacts. I've got 500 contacts on my iPod, and it's really messy to stir a few hundred caches in amongst them. Yes, you could say this is true of Notes as well, but I don't keep many notes on my iPod (I don't suspect that many users do). - No log entries are shown - The user can't choose whether or not to encrypt the hints (not a big deal) So this script gets around those limitations (note gpx2txt also requires gpsbabel to operate). The gpsbabel vCard method does have the advantage of being available to Windows users as well, whereas this is a shell script and requires a Mac. Your program is a shell script. I have cygwin installed which runs all maner of shell scripts very nicely. So its not a "mac only" option. or if a user has access to a linux or solaris account they can run the tool from there as well. Mac is unix and unix is mac, only with fewer features. To be clear. Cygwin is a posix compliant flavor of unix that runs on top of windows and its opensource. Quote Link to comment
+shacker Posted August 2, 2007 Author Share Posted August 2, 2007 True enough - you could run this version with Cygwin - hadn't thought of that. The next version of this script will be renamed "gpx2ipod" and will be MUCH more user friendly, with automatic iPod detection, an options menu, stored user preferences, double-click launching, and immediate pushing of generated text files straight to the iPod. Unfortunately, while the current version would run under Cygwin, the coming version will take some tweaking to be happy on anything but OS X. However, if you'd like to work on the project with me to make it *nix-compatible, that would be great Quote Link to comment
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