MyGPSFiles, what is it?

A web app to read GPS tracks stored on your PC Windows, PC Linux or Mac.
It is also possible to quickly create and modify GPS tracks.
Its goals:

• Easy: You can open tracks by two ways: by the menu "Tracks->Open..." or by dragging files into the web page*. No registration is required.
• Quick: Tracks files are directly read* and processed from your computer. No need to upload them to a server*.
• Multi-tracks: You can open and display several tracks at a time.

(*) Depend on the web browser (check browser compatibility).

The application

The page of the application is here:
http://www.mygspfiles.com/app/

Features

Reader

• Supported formats: gpx, tcx
• Units: km, miles or nautic miles for distance. Meters or feet for elevation. km/h, mph ou knots for speed.
• Maps: Google maps

Other features in pictures:

To open tracks, you can drag and drop files into the web page. Here, this is Windows. But it also works on Linux and Mac.	Display of several tracks. Select a track to get more details on a given points of the trail.
A map for French users but you can see that all windows can be moved, resized, docked.	All rows of the table are sortable. Sums of distances, durations, elevations are displayed in the bottom of the table.
2 maps are displayed. The maps are automatically centered on the cursor when it moves.	Tip: The StreetView pegman sometimes offers nice panoramas closed to our tracks. Useful for remembering a good ride or checking the route of a new one.
Web browsers that do not support reading of local files need to use the server. The loading is then much slower but, once the tracks are loaded, MyGPSFiles normally works.	GPS signal losts appear in grey in the slider bar. The corresponding segments are not drawn to the maps/graphs. Those segments are still used in the distance computation to be as close as possible to what your rode.

Editor

Another feature of MyGPSFiles: tracks modification and creation.
Like other good editors, it is possible to add and move points, change starting and end points, revert the track.

What MyGPSFiles offers more:

• Load all tracks and take advantage of the path following tool to create your own new track with very few clicks.
• Quickly modify a track. According to the map scale, MyGPSFiles offers a limited number of reference points to move.
  At small scale, you can accurately modify the track.
  At large scale, you can modify the track on several hundred of meters (or km) by moving a single point.

Note 1: To create a course: Menu -> Track -> Create...
Note 2: Adding or moving a point leads to the loose of time information: date, duration, mean speed, etc are removed.

A video tutorial:
(In French, but it is pretty graphic)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgrGA6MNitY
And in pictures:

The path following. The red course has been drawn with 5 clics (not more). It reuses the elevation of the followed track.

The reference points. Their number depends on the map scale. Right click on it to open a dialog with the available tools.

Replay

The Replay window allows to replay tracks.
If you load several tracks done on the same course, you can use this feature to do a virtual race and thus compare your performances.

With Replay, you can see the evolution according to the time of:

• position of each people
• ranking
  

Note 1: Replay is relative, at t=0, all cursors are set at the beginning of each track. Then, they move from this point.
So, starting points are really important. Use the editor to change them if necessary.
Note 2: The ranking is based on the done distance. The 1st one is the one that did the longest distance at the instant t.

A video showing the feature:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgrGA6MNitY And some screenshots:

To open the Replay window, go to Menu -> Windows Controls are the same as a video player: Play/Pause/Stop. Tracks have been previously modified with the editor tool (right click on a point -> "Start Here") in order to have starting points as close as possible.	After 5min45, Pierre has done 2.342km. Paul has done 339m less. Paul is 41s late (Pierre was where Paul currently is 41s ago).

Web browser compatibility

MyGPSFiles runs on all machines (Windows, Mac or Linux) with a WEB browser. Note that it has not been yet tested/adapted to be used from a smartphone or a a tablet.

For file opening and quick reading, the app uses new features of the new HTML format, HTML5: local file access and file drag&drop.

At that time, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer (with the Chrome Frame plugin) are 100% compliant with these needs. Opera, 90%.
For other browsers, MyGPSFiles uses workarounds. But they affects the loading time.
The table above shows features supported by the most common browsers:

WEB Browser	MyGPSFiles	Quick loading	Drag'n'Drop
Chrome	Yes	Yes	Yes
FireFox	Yes	Yes	Yes
Internet Explorer (6, 7, 8, 9) with Chrome Frame	Yes	Yes	Yes
Opera	Yes	Yes	No
Internet Explorer (8, 9) without Chrome Frame	Yes	No	No
Safari	Yes	No	No

Explanations:

• MyGPSfiles: Once tracks are loaded, MyGPSFiles behaves exactly the same on all browsers.
• Quick loading: Indicates if the browser supports local file access. If not, tracks data will go through our server to go from your desktop into the web page.
  It is much more slower. The loading speed will then depend on yout Internet connection speed. In this case, the size of the tracks are limited to 2Mb. Files are automatically deleted from the server
• Drag'n'Drop: Indicates if the browser supports this very useful feature.
• Google Chrome Frame: This is a plugin for IE that enables HTML5 features.

No more plugin

After 8 months, the MyGPSFiles plugin is no more required to display your tracks.
The new web application does not need it.
The old web page used by the pluhin (/onmypc/) will be still available but no more maintained. I advise you to uninstall the plugin and to use the new app.

In terms of functionnalities, you loose the file explorer and the shortcut to launch MyGPSFiles when you click on a GPX or a TCX files.
But, you win in quick loading, accuracy (all points of the track are now displayed) and in ease of reading (you choose the tracks you want to display).
On my side, development becomes easier. If I add a new feature, I will not have to ask people to install a new version of the plugin.

News

17/04/2012:	Fixed a bug in elevation computation. Added the Replay window(doc).
03/03/2012:	Track creation & edition (doc).
22/01/2012:	MyGPSFiles is now on Twitter and Facebook.
17/11/2011:	On Internet Explorer, set up the Google Chrome frame plugin to use 100% of the MyGPSFiles features.
08/11/2011:	Display GPS signal lost (screenshot).
31/10/2011:	New application: The plugin is not more required. MyGPSFiles runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Tracks loading is quicker and the display is more accurate (all points are now displayed)
25/06/2011:	Tracks colors can be changed.
14/06/2011:	Opera is supported again. Well, the application indicates what to do if it fails to start.
12/06/2011:	The application is now compatible with Internet Explorer 9. Added a preference dialog to change the language (English or French), the units, the width and the opacity of tracks.
15/04/2011:	The tracks of the current folder can be hidden/displayed. The sums are updated according to the selected visible tracks.
31/03/2011:	English version.
26/03/2011:	Display sums of currently displayed tracks: sums of distances, durations, elevations and the mean of speed means. Added a second map view. Available from menu Window > Map #2. By default, maps follow cursor moves. This options can be disabled (Map > Follow cursor).
06/02/2011:	Launch of the website.

Big Thanks

This project uses numerous tools and libraries either from the open source community or made freely available. The quality of these projects is really impressive.
So, a big thanks to:

• jquery for all graphics (windows, tables, graphes, ...). I use the following plugins: layout, mbMenu, jstree, ui, jqGrid, flot, Mousewheel, populate, localize, jquery-cookie, jquery-file-plugin, jQuery-File-Upload, jquery.iframe-transport, jquery.editable.
• Turbomilk for the icons.
• jscolor a color picker.
• pnglib.js for the javascript implementation of the png library.
• Downloadify & swfobject to save file.
• Google Maps API to display tracks and maps from different sources.
• google-maps-utility-library-v3 for infobubble.js.
• OpenLayers for the XML decoding.
• YUI Compressor by Yahoo to boost up the application loading.
• Google Maps for the maps.
• Géoportail for French topographic map.

The project

This is a "midnight" project. Its progession depends on my spare time and the weather.
It is far to be a professtional software but it useable as is.
The story of this project is quite classic. I have been using for years an homemade application to display my gpx files without having to do plenty of tricks, upload, etc. This winter, as I still did not find a simple tool to read my tracks, I decided to make my homemade application more user friendly in order to share it. And here is MyGPSFiles.

Manu