Glop

I looked at a way of preloading the j2memap application with maps from Google Maps. Great! I can put the maps on the phone, no permission errors, no messing. Or so I thought, unfortunately it’s actually quite crap.

I found an application that given a particular URI will download maps from that source for a given set of coordinates, longitude and latitude. You also choose the zoom level.

Now, I wanted a map of Dublin on my phone. For it to be of any use, it needs to have a reasonable level of zoom, which when downloaded with the above application spews out around 30 or so mb of map data. Grand job, no hassle, I’ve a 1GB memory card in the phone. Of course I was being somewhat stupid about it.

By preloading a jar file, as described here, you take the maps, convert them to a certain filename and stored them in the cache directory in the jar. A Java jar file being in fact a zip file, so this is quite easy. The problem occurs when you want to load this jar onto the phone. My phone, a SE K750i, copies the jar file to the phone memory before it runs… So I am going to be always limited to the phone memory size, not the size of the memory card. *NNNNnnnnnngggghhhh*

I am just going to have to wait for a signed midlet that loads the data from the memory card filesystem. I did also look at writing a small httpserver, which would have encountered the same problems as above, but in fact the phone can only run one java application at a time anyway !

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under GPS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.