TraX

There are not many applications that allow you to create tracks/routes for GPS devices, especially for the GPS devices made for outdoor activities. I wanted some tool that I could use to create a track for my GPS for when I was hiking or biking. Clicking Google maps to create the list of points that make the track would be nice. But help from other maps, like OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap would be even nicer.

All these maps are combined in TraX. Plus the ability to create the tracks following the roads or bike paths by calling into the Google Maps API and asking for the route between two points, so that you have the certainty that you won’t go straight through a building.

The second aspect is the analyzer. Once you did your track, you can open it in TraX and you can edit or remove the points (to fix various GPS flaws, and boy there are a lot of them). The analyzer will also compute statistics like average and maximum speed, moving time, total time, total ascent and descent, etc.

The code used by the analyzer is actually the same code used by the TraXCatalog site to compute the same statistics, so there are no discrepancies between the two.

For the future, I’m thinking to add options to automatically load the tracks from a GPS when the device is connected to an USB port and to automatically upload it to dedicated sites such as traxcatalog.net and strava.com.