A few days after posting my flight trace last week, I got email from Clark Weber at MotionBased. He wanted to know if I'd ever tried their service. All I needed to do was extract the GPS trace in a format they grok, and it would produce a nice display of my flight path.
We discussed it a bit and I ended up just sending him the IGC file from my flight. He was able to convert it into something useful using G7ToWin (a good tool for getting data into and out of Garmin GPS units).
The result is this page.
While their service clearly wasn't built for handling traces from glider pilots, I suspect that by putting a bit more work into it they'd come up with something that'd nicely complement the OLC traces, like the one I posted last week.
If, on the other hand, you routinely bike, hike, or jog with a GPS, give MotionBased a try.
I suspect I'll be playing with MotionBased more in the future. There's a lot of the service I haven't had a chance to explore.
Posted by jzawodn at May 02, 2005 12:24 PM
MotionBased might want to make their page Firefox friendly (yes, I have javascript enabled). I get this error popup:
"MotionBased Page Error X
Error: This page has experienced an error. JavaScript is required to use MotionBased. Please make sure your security settings in Internet Explorer allows JavaScript.
Norton Internet Security: Sometimes prohibits dynamic pages (like this one) from performing necessary actions. You may need to change some settings in order for this application to work."
Yeah, I was interested in motionbased but the IE only bit kinda turned me off. I don't even have IE at home, since we're all linux, and that's where I would be using motionbased from.
Totally agree on the IE issue. I can tell you that the entire MotionBased team uses Firefox as our primary browser.
This sticky point revolves around embedded SVG in an HTML file which the Firefox browser does not handle very well. The good news is that we are working directly with the SVG Implementation team on the Firefox development team. They have heard our woes and both parties are making some changes to get some of core features (Map Player and Analyzer) working in the Firefox browser. This should happen with the release of 1.1 Fingers crossed!!!
And for the Mac crew... MotionBased is working with multiple parties to get USB drivers built to communicate with the latest GPS devices. This has been our pain point for Mac platform. We'll mostly likely require Mac OS X on the Firefox 1.1 browser to use MotionBased -- unless the latest version of Safari tests better than previous versions.
