Useful (and free) data for Toucan Navigate

Our main objective with Toucan Navigate is to help people create meaningful maps very quickly. If you're looking for readily-available datasets, try these two web sites. Both provide useful and free data that can be downloaded and displayed in Toucan Navigate. Once downloaded, with just a few mouse clicks you can start viewing them over the roads maps and satellite imagery from Virtual Earth. You can also edit these datasets to fit your specific needs.

• GPS Data Team. This website has a large selection of POI (Points of Interest) from many countries. The image below shows Wal-Mart stores in the U.S, which were downloaded from their bulk download page. You will need to choose one of the .csv formats available and add a header row (Name, Longitude, Latitude).

• ESRI. ESRI offers free map data from the Census Bureau, which are very useful. You will find water bodies, census tracks and many other GIS files compatible with Toucan Navigate. ESRI also provides a simple way to download World Baseline Data in .shp format.

Download Toucan Navigate and start mapping your data now.

GPSTray updated

We're releasing updates and full versions of all our software this month, and first off the block is GPSTray. This application connects to your GPS and lets you use a Bambuco script to send your GPS location to Groove, SQL Server or to anywhere else.

If you've bought Toucan Navigate, contact us and we'll send you a copy of the update.

Introducing Toucan Navigate 2007

This month we will start delivering the new version of Toucan Navigate (2007) to our clients and also introducing a free version. Our focus this time around has been on delivering an application that combines what is most attractive about internet mapping applications (i.e. on-demand detailed maps and satellite images, address look-ups and routes) with what's attractive about desktop applications (i.e. privacy, offline work, rich user experience).

Here's a video of the new Toucan Navigate.

Connecting your GPS to Groove

We've developed a task-tray application to connect your GPS to Groove. It improves on the connection in Toucan Navigate 2.1 in a number of ways:

• Talks direct to Groove Forms rather than the Toucan Navigate app. This means it can work even when the Groove UI is closed.
  
• Transparently connects and re-connects to USB/Bluetooth GPS Units.
  
• Uses our 'Bambuco' scripting technology to make it easy to create flexible GPS apps.

It was used to good effect in the Strong Angel 3 exercises last week where we created a script to additionally generate SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) data that was uploaded to a central server.

Existing Toucan Navigate customers can get a version now - contact Mark or Gabe.