Sunday, April 5, 2009

The Tower Walk in Google Earth


Google Earth remains the most powerful viewer of tracks and such, so viewing the Tower walk in Google Earth is a good thing, too. You don't have access to your velocity at key points in the track, as in MotionBased, but you do have better sense of the terrain and can add additional overlays.

Prior to the most recent release, you had to pay $20/year for the privilege of uploading your GPS tracks to Google Earth. With Release 5.0 this is no longer true and you can open GPX files in Google earth. But the question is how does one have access to the GPX file?

I could send it to you as an attachment to an email. You could export it from Motionbased Dashboard and then open it on your computer with Google Earth. Or, it could be "served" from a website. Try this as a test.

I'll save the Tower Walk to my Google Sites page. I'll link the thumbnail graphic to the file on that page. If all goes well, clicking on the thumbnail should "serve" the GPX file to Google Earth (unless you have another application set up to read GPX files, which you may well have). In that event, you may simply be asked what you want to do with the file. If so, save it in a place you can find and then open it with Google Earth.

A better alternative, is to make the GPX file into a KMZ file which will be recognized by Google Earth and opened directly in it. I'll do that in a future posting.

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