I have contacted Phoenix ITD, an Australian distributor for Destinator, and have asked them to see if i can get the Destinator SDK... They seem keen to help. Obviously I won't get to excited until i have the SDK in my hands.

But I am hoping if i can get it I will develop a Standalone GPS program simular to FreeDrive and MapMonkey for integration into the many FrontEnds out there... And also develop an integrated version into a frontend which I am going to develop...

If i can develop these Phoenix ITD themselves are possibly interested in distributing it as they only solution they found is Centrafuse...

You'll need to purchase the SDK won't you ? Did they say how much ?

I believe there are some GPS open source apps / frameworks out there already.

Will be interested to watch your progress !

Yes I believe so. No they haven't talked price yet.

I haven't seen any open source apps for aussie maps yet? Freedrive 2.0 is unsure of release... (as he is currently using a cracked copy of the SDK (PN) to develop with) I don't know of any others using newer than D3 SDK..?

This will be a closed source to keep Destinator happy legally... but I will be happy to take all suggestions onboard to meet as many people as possible's needs...

I hope it works out but I'll go from here once I get a copy of the SDK...

awesome news. best of luck.
but as u said - not happy till u get ur hands on it.
Ive heard powerlok is a PITA to deal with.. full of talk.

but hopefully they see the light.
very interested to hear about this.

So what's the deal with this? Whoever plans on developing an application which utilises the maps pays for the SDK and makes whatever they want with it and that's it yeah? The end users of that product that was made using the SDK doesn't have to pay for the SDK also do they (i.e. they just pay for the maps to use with whatever someone has developed as a gps nav program)?

Good luck. The only person that has been able to get the SDK from powerloc is David from Fluxmedia (Centrafuse) and he paid a fortune for it. Not to mention that he is locked into a certain amount of sales as well. Also the SDK that david uses is specifically written for Centrafuse.
If you end up getting the SDK from Pheonix ITD you are extremely lucky. Ever since the days of MapMonkey and Freedrive, Powerloc has been extremely protective of giving anything away.

Ok bad news (not unexpected though) Destinator won't let me have the SDK without "significant up-front financial requirement"...

Damn that sucks...

Does anyone know of any other options for us Aussies? I want to be able to develop something that us aussies can use legally...

I had thought maybe if i could somehow get the Google Maps for Australia?

I work for a company that does vehicle monitoring (part of which is GPS tracking) and i discussed Google Maps with them. I use google maps to track my car, but i don't believe there's any way to download the maps and store them on a PC, it's all about having requests sent to a server, meaning a constant internet connection is required (not practical for most carPC users). If you can find something that says otherwise though, let me know .

ohhhhhhhhhh.. I dont think thats true anymore

Check Mp3car for latest goops, google earth and caching google maps threads - in the GPS section IIRC. Im pretty sure theyve done it

ah sweet. I'll look into it

Did a bit of looking about on the net and mp3car forums - doesn't look like caching for google maps has been achieved yet. Google earth - yes, google maps - doesn't look like it...

Yeah the Google Maps is the part i want... I don't care about Google Earth... I can already see what it looks like around me

http://www.openstreetmap.org/ Looks interesting but still needs a lot of info added for Australia... I dunno what software is available that can use these maps for routing that is suitable for a carputer...

When i was discussing the enterprise edition of google maps with some of the people at work they were saying that Google actually provides you with a physical map server and everything, which would mean maps stored locally on that server rather than having all your clients requests going to google. But nobody is going to pay the massive fee just so they can use it for nav in their car . I wouldn't be suprised if Google did release the maps for download at some point in the near future though for non-profit users. We can only hope.

With a slogan like 'do no evil', one could expect that they may even release the maps for non-profit ventures, however, I think most will agree that:



1) Its a little suss for a company to have a slogan like that - You'd almost think they ARE up to something.

2) They ARE up to something! They read your Gmail, they target and store all searches that your pc generates, they are cataloging the worlds literature without express written consent, etc etc. I personally think they have a great search engine, but they are too aggressive in the way they process and store YOUR data and I dont personally trust them. Data when correctly categorised becomes information and information is knowledge. Knowledge is.... exactly.

Which is why i have shares in them

this might help... seems to offer google maps caching - but its for Palm/PDA. Perhaps you have a PDA and can save the cache data to ur PC after DL'ing it.
http://www.aximsite.com/boards/gps-talk/21...te-offline.html



I dont think it downloads all the maps automatically - you actually have to manually navigate to that location to view (and therefore download) them.. but atleast its a possible start.

Hmm looks interesting. I might try and get in touch with the maker of it and see if the functionality can be ported/adapted over to a CarPC environment. The main thing is getting the maps stored locally and in some sort of consistent format. After that it's "just" programming.

http://www.teletype.com/Merchant2/merchant...e=OEMDevelopers

Also look into PocketPC app SDKs running within a emulator.