Another POI Loader 2.6.0 Conundrum.

It was a nice thought on their part, but I wouldn't bet my life on it working reliably.

Works right if you reverse the coords for Garmin in Olathe KS though.

another csr that hasn't been educated about the product

It does make you loose confidence in your helper when they make a mistake like that.

I wonder if there are different versions of PoiLoader based on what country one selects from the drop down list here: http://www.garmin.com/garmin/cms/site/us

For example for the PoiLoader downloaded after having selected “United States”, the longitude could be identified by the minus sign.

If so, I would think there would be difficulties in dealing with countries that have parts both east and west of the Prime Meridian or north and south of the equator and for those that have the same sign for both coordinates.

It works in Western South Dakota too.

There are several ways to approach this. One would be to just take the view that the vast majority of the market is in some particular country and figure that POI's outside of the country need adjustment. Another would be to take the current GPS location and figure any longitude more than, say, 90 degrees east or west might be suspect. Or you could examine the numbers and figure that something is amiss if a latitude is greater than 90. Then you can look at the entire file and exercise some considerations on patterns of locations.

No method is perfect but a good algorithm could make common errors less a hassle. They key is being able to override any such corrections if necessary because you do really want something wierd.

My current poi loader works flawlessly....is there any real reason to upgrade to the new one?

This.

I did a swap test using some Harley POIs from Poi Factory with locations in USA and Australia

The correct csv fields for garmin (longitude,latitude) would have signs -,+ for USA and +,- for Australia.

Before loading the POIs with PoiLoader 2.6.0 I edited the USA Pois so that they "incorrectly" have lat,long in the fields:

39.3003,-94.6679,Harley-Davidson Manufacturing Plant,Harley-Davidson Manufacturing Plant
38.962,-92.2517,Mid America Harley Davidson,
38.5101,-90.32,Gateway Harley-Davidson,

144.35574,-38.14257, "Gelong Harley Davidson 70-72 Mercer St Geelong VIC (03) 52232102",""
150.89354,-34.38967, "Fraser Motorcycles Wollongong 11-13 Princes Highway Fairy Meadow NSW (02) 42851400",""
153.4107,-27.97678, "Gold Coast HD Cnr Ferry Rd & Minnie St Southport QLD (07) 55914822",""

PoiLoader correctly swapped the USA fields and left the Australia ones alone.

So apparently PoiLoader does not care where you are at the time you run it but instead decides based on acceptable combinations of latitude and longitude.

So, alandb, I think you were correct when you assumed "this feature meant that you could create a .CSV file with latitude,longitude (instead of longitude,latitude) which is the more common convention used by Google Maps, Bing Maps and some other geocoding systems".

There are several features in the new one that some of us like, if they do not matter to you then there still is the concept that change is the wave of the future.

When DOS 3.1 added networking capability to the hard drive capability that DOS 2.0 brought to the table, a lot of users drug their feet on further revisions because 3.1 was working fine for them.

Those who were willing to accept change and thus support improvements are the ones that helped the computer industry make the marvelous advances they did.

Sure at each revision there were (and always will be) problems that required temporary workarounds but the solutions and feedback to the source are part of the development and advance of any product.

You have to ask yourself, am I going to go forward or be a stick in the mud? Am I going to help push the wave forward or am I going to let others do it for me?

Probably no reason to upgrade just yet, unless you want to automate with command line switches.

IMO they made some errors in parsing column 3 when it contains double-quoted commas, and it will likely be corrected in the next release. If your current files work fine, I'd wait.

If the current version is doing everything you wish done, then the rule "if it's not broken, don't fix it" seems applicable.

I concur - I have not seen any compelling reason to install the newer version. I'll stay with what I am using for now.

I like the new version, mostly because it supports multiple .gpi files without having to rename poi.gpi. It is too bad Garmin broke the column 3 quoted field parsing, and hopefully they will fix this. And I am disappointed that the "swapped lon and lat" change didn't mean what I thought it did. But unless a more serious problem turns up I will stay with 2.6.0.

??? Did you read my Swap Test post above?

You confirmed that Garmin's response to my question was correct (other than getting the default lon,lat sequence wrong), and my understanding of the change was incorrect. Thanks.

Sorry but I am confused about what understanding you had that you say was incorrect.

This is the “understanding” that I thought you were talking about:

I believe that understanding is correct.

Please tell me exactly what understanding you think is incorrect.

I originally interpreted this feature to mean that I could purposefully create a .CSV with all coordinate values listed as latitude,longitude and indicate this to POI Loader via a preference setting or selection for that file. I think it is a poor design for POI Loader to arbitrarily "decide" line-by-line that coordinate values need to be swapped based on the context of the values. I realize that if this feature is designed properly, it should not cause problems for typical North America POI's because there are very few (if any) land based coordinates that become probable locations when reversed. It would be interesting to know what rules Garmin has programmed into the coordinate reversal logic to avoid an ambiguous situation like the Bosnia/Saudi Arabia example given in my earlier post.

Yeah, there is that advantage too. I forgot about being able to name the .gpi file.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I am a hammer headed old Dutchman and am often slow on the uptake.

I would like to know the rules also. They very reticent about any of the details that users would like to know about this and many other features.

There are four quadrants to deal with: (-,+) (+,-) (-,-) and (+,+)

The few I have tried in the first two quadrants seem to work ok.

So it looks like someone in the USA planning a trip to Australia could download pois for there and load them on their Gamin without fear of PoiLoader accidentally swapping the coordinates.

Also someone in the USA could obtain csv pois that has coordinates as lat,long and not have to manually swap them before loading with PoiLoader.

Looks like the -,- quadrant is a “who cares” area.

I have no idea of how they would deal with a +,+ area.

I tried the Bosnia and Saudi coordinates you mentioned by putting them a file named BosniaSaudi.csv:

45.00000,18.31200,Saudia Arabia
18.31200,45.00000,Bosnia

PoiLoader 2.6.0 indicated that two pois had successfully loaded and the category BosniaSaudi showed in my 255W Extras. But when I selected the category, it responded “No Matches Found”. So my Garmin and/or PoiLoader apparently does not like coordinates in those two countries at all. (I notice that neither appears in the Country Selection drop down box on Gamin’s web site.)

Next I tried the following Dachau POW camp (in Germany) poi downloaded from Poi Factory:

11.468056,48.270278, DPC (As downloaded except shortened name)
48.270278,11.468056,DPC (swapped by me)

First I loaded just the original one and my 255W showed it listed in the Extras. (So at least this +,+ quadrant coordinate will work on my Garmin.)

Then I loaded only the (swapped by me) version and PoiLoader indicated one poi successfully loaded but when I looked in the Extras on my 255W there were none to be found.

I notice the (swapped by me) as long,lat is a point in the Gulf of Adin . I would have thought that would have caused a swapping by PoiLoader, but apparently it did not. I am thinking the poi is not being dealt with at all because of the country it is located in.

Bottom line is that right now I am thinking that there is no automatic swapping done in the +,+ quadrant and that there are countries where pois are not accepted at all.

Hoping this is not a brain dead question. I have transferred several renamed gpi files to my 1350 using ver 2.6.0, and looking at the POI folder they are all nice and snug as a bug in a rug. Though they do not show up on my GPS. Having the ability to have numerous poi.gpi files on my PC with all kinds of names doesn't seem all that helpful to me. Am I missing something regarding the GPS.

You can only have one poi.gpi but you can have an unknown number of othernamed.gpi files. (poi.gpi is the default name used by PoiLoader.)

I take it that you mean that the names of the othernamed.gpi files does not show up in your Garmin's Extras. I assume that the pois do appear.

The usefulness has to do with how you organize the files on your computer,how you update and manage them, and how you send them to your Garmin.

For example, it gives me the ability to manage my Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota pois on my Garmin separately. If I chose, I can update just one of state's pois and send the new ones to my Garmin without loosing all the other states that would have been in a single poi.gpi file.

Or I could delete all the Wyoming pois by deleting Wyoming.gpi on my Garmin.

If I take a trip to North Dakota and just want a few Fargo pois I could quickly create a Fargo folder on my computer, put a csv or gpx file with the pois in it and point PoiLoader to the Fargo folder.

That would create a Fargo.gpi on my Garmin and would not disturb any of the other pois. Later I could delete the Fargo.gpi file when I discovered it was too blamed cold up there to want to go back.

Each individual of course will have their own management schemes but I think using multiple named .gpi files is the key to having more choices in how it is done.

I don't think so, but some do it just because it's there.

If you put the .gpi files into your unit's Garmin\POI folder then they should show up under Extras>Custom Pois.

The advantage I find is that you can group sets of pois together, rename them to something meaningful other than 'Poi.gpi', and recompile them or load/unload them to/from your unit without bothering with your other sets.

Have a look at this faq about using (or not) subfolders to categorize the sets when you compile them-
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/25721

In that case, why not dump the CSV format on this website and convert everything over to GPX? That way every file will have consistent name, address, phone, description and web URL available. Those with GPS devices or software that can't handle the advanced format can use EPE to save them as CSV files for their personal use, separate into states, etc. Why should advanced users be chained to primitive data stores?

I agree with you that it would be the way to go. Now you just need to convince the site owners.

Well, I figured someone might care about that quadrant so I tried the following poi in Brazil that I found on another site. As downloaded from that site it was in lat,long format.

-24.366667,-51.416667,Ruinas de Santo Antonio,Brazil

I loaded it on my 255W with PoiLoader 2.6.0 and the poi showed up in the Extras.

So at least a -,- coordinate made it to my Garmin.

Problem is that it took the -24.366667 to be the longitude and plunked the poi out in the South Atlantic ocean.

So apparently PoiLoader takes -,- coordinates to be long,lat and does not swap them even if the result is a poi out in the ocean.

So that would mean that version 2.6.0 has other issues as well. I personally would not expect the lat/long to work correctly.

Thanks for all the work on that Evert.

Even though it apparently has some chance to work for us in CONUS and those in or visiting Australia, it seems to me that it would be impossible to implement uniformly and correctly on a worldwide basis.

Although I tend to favor change and advancement, I think that the auto-swapping feature is a bad idea and should be abandoned. I don’t think the auto swap concept could be implemented accurately enough to even have a selection to use it or not.

If a swap routine is to be available, I think that there should be a choice to swap all the coordinates in the folder being loaded (the default being to not swap).

However, since none of my pois would be affected by the auto swap train wreck, I am still going to keep using 2.6.0

It was kind of a brain dead question on my part but what the heck. Not first not last. Messed around and now I see that advantage.

Ya see, I have to sound like I know what I talking about if the little misses asks any questions.

many Thanks to all.

Reminds me of the old saying: If you can't dazzle them with brilliance you can always baffle 'em with BS.

I may be wrong, but I think this lon/lat auto-swap feature has been over exagerated. I do not think Garmin does what you think it does. It's too complicated and definitively too risky.

I think (because this is what I would have done) it works only with CSV files which have a header line on the first line. They parse the column title to see anything that looks like LONgiture or LATitude. Nothing more fency. If they see a title with LON, they assume it is longitude. It probably just works on the first 2 columns.

Like I said, I may be wrong but this is the simplest way for them to add this functionality without causing Techsupport problem tickets overflow.

MY 2 cents on the subject.

Turbo

Then don't touch it.

Turbo, I am certain that they do not use a header to determine whether to swap or not. Maybe you did not see my Swap Test post above?

In that test I did not have any header in my csv file. Here is one of the test pois located in the USA and one in Australia.

The USA one is lat,long format and the Australia one is long,lat format.
Note they both are positive in field one and negative in field two.

Other tests I made and reported indicate there is no swapping done at all if both fields are of the same sign.

When I ran PoiLoader 2.6.0 it swapped the USA ones and left the Australian ones alone.

39.3003,-94.6679,Harley-Davidson Manufacturing Plant,Harley-Davidson Manufacturing Plant
144.35574,-38.14257, "Gelong Harley Davidson 70-72 Mercer St Geelong VIC (03) 52232102",""

Also consider this: nothing I have seen from Garmin indicates the use of a header row in a csv file. Have you seen any reference to that?

I am going to go back and repeat that German poi test again and try using a header row to see if it swaps correctly after not swapping in the earlier test.

Hi Evert, Ok. You are probably right. It was just an assumption on my part. I had forgotten your previous post. My bad. Still, this is too much prone to errors.

Could they be using your current computer Locale to make this decision?

Hi Turbo

I was not hooked to the internet when I made the tests but no doubt there is traces of my IP address on my computer. I have no idea of how snoopy their software is or how often it is sent to the mother ship.

But I doubt that the current location of the person would by itself determine whether or not to swap.

For example, for my location both the usa and the austrailian coordinates should have been swapped if only fields one and two are examined because for my location, field one is where negative coordinates is expected for Garmin format.

I just took a custom poi file I had with 12 locations.Left the first 6 longitude,latitude.Change the next 6 to latitude,longitude and ran poiloader 2.60.Only 10 of the 12 showed up on gps.One in NC in one in OH missing from gps.Both had latitude,longitude on csv file.All others in US showed up.One point of interest was that the one in OH missing with latitude,Longitude the other location in OH showed up on gps that was Longitude,Latitude.A big file you may not even notice what was missing.Best to keep as longitude,Latitude.

Edit.Went back and took the same csv file with 12 locations in US.Put all 12 Latitude,Longitude and only 3 showed up on gps.Even if you could swap them it would create a problem with Extra Poi Editor.