GPX Track Converter
The GPX file track tool is something I created to help me coerce portions of the many excellent routes and tracks you can find on the web into something I can reuse for touring.
There are many great web sites that will allow you to create a route by overlaying Google Maps with a point an click interface to plot your own route. My personal favourite is GPSies, but Bikely and MapMyRide are also very popular with cyclists.
Excellent though these sites are, they can sometimes lack the one thing you need to get the route off the screen and onto your GPS:
- The route might be perfect, if only it was in the other direction.
- The GPX download file might not play nicely with MapSource.
- The default route format may need converting into a track.
- The route may need breaking into smaller parts to fit on your GPS.
It was with these sorts of scenarios in mind that I began writing my own tool to allow me to tweak the GPX (or google KML) files I got off the web into something I could use on my GPS. The track tool (pictured opposite) allows me to resolve the issues above and others.
If you want to try it, you can download a copy here. It is only a 80KB zip file as there is no installer just the program itself. You will need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 installed, which many Windows computers have these days or you can download it from Microsoft.
As the tool is a bit of a play thing for me, there is nothing in the way of documentation available for it at the moment, but the explorer style design will hopefully make it fairly easy to figure out.
The tool is evolving as I keep thinking of new things to add and I have no formal design plan or version control (I am only making it available in response to requests from users from the above sites). In the interest of a quite life I will place what I consider to be stable builds on here, but I am sure there are bugs (there always are when someone starts using software in a different way than you imagined), so caveat emptor!
If you do encounter a bug or are a bit stuck on how to use it then feel free to email me and I will see if I can help.
