GpsPrune is available to download from the downloads page, with the latest released version being version 13.4. Details of the development of version 14 are given here.
Please also look at the book proposal for a detailed user guide for GpsPrune. Your feedback is important.
The following features have been suggested for version 14, but this list is still very open to discussion. See the wishlist for new features which have been proposed by users of Prune.
And those functions which didn't make it:
The first task to do for version 14 was the points dragging functionality. Thanks to zingo for providing the patch! This is now integrated and seems to work well. The edit mode has to be explicitly activated, so it's pretty difficult to drag points around by accident, which is good. This has also been recently extended to allow easier insertion of single points between existing ones too.
Next on the list was making nautical miles and knots available, which required a rethink of the whole units stuff and quite a few changes. This includes extending the "full range details" as shown in this preliminary screenshot. There are a bunch of new fields included, and it's much clearer now whether the figures refer to the whole range or just the individual sections.
Also, Jörg has got in touch saying he's got a patch for tile downloading, which would be a useful addition. If I can get that patch and integrate it, then it will be much easier to cache a load of tiles automatically in preparation for offline use. I've asked Jörg for his patch, but after several weeks there hasn't been a response yet. We'll have to wait and see. However, we should be careful with bulk tile downloading, to make sure GpsPrune complies properly with openstreetmap's tile usage policy (and the policies of the other map sources too). I'm not sure whether existing tools like gmapcatcher and jtiledownloader comply or not...
When downloading points from Wikipedia or tracks from gpsies, previously it's only been possible to download one point or track at a time. With a small extension, you can now select multiple items (with ctrl-click or shift-click in the list) and download them all in one go.
Another new entry in the "Range" menu - instead of deleting the currently selected range, you can now delete everything except the selected range, to crop the track so that it only includes the selected bit. This is useful if you just want to export part of the track, now you don't have to select the bit before, then delete, then select the bit after, then delete. You can now just go to Range -> Crop track, and it's done. Be aware though, that if any of the points being deleted has either a photo or an audio file attached to it, you will be prompted whether to delete the photo (not delete it from your disk, of course, just remove it from GpsPrune's list), or to keep it (and thereby detach it from its point).
Version 13.3 has recently been released with some language updates and important fixes. Of course these have all been implemented in version 14 too, as well as a neat extension to the interpolate tool. Up till now it's only been possible to interpolate between two adjacent points - now you can select a bigger range and it will insert new points between each pair of track points in the range. This is a good trick for densifying a sparse track.
Up until now, GpsPrune hasn't been able to play mp3s loaded from a http URL, because it can't play them itself and couldn't launch an external music player if the file didn't exist... now GpsPrune can save the downloaded data to a temporary file and give that to the external player, which is a useful addition.
There's also now an extremely minimal "American English" translation set available, so all those people who want to see the words "colour", "centre" and "metre" spelled the way they're used to, can select it as an alternative.
We've now got the final feature set for version 14, so the texts are frozen and published on the wiki. Some of the languages have already been completed, thanks to eager volunteers! There are still a couple of niggles to fix and then thorough testing can begin. There are quite a few changes under the covers though, so testing it all will not be easy.
Meanwhile, there has recently been a 13.4 release to solve a couple of irritating bugs. But we're still working on version 14 to get it finished, translated and tested.
| Language | Completion for v13 | Completion for v14 |
|---|---|---|
| English, German, Swiss German, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Chinese | 100% | 100% |
| Spanish, Hungarian, Russian, Portuguese, Italian | 100% | 98% |
| Korean, French | 96% | 95% |
| Japanese | 79% | 77% |
| Turkish | 59% | 58% |
| Afrikaans | 28% | 28% |
| Romanian | 25% | 26% |
| Indonesian | 13% | 13% |
| Danish | 11% | |
| Farsi | 9% | 9% |
The translations of GpsPrune are in greatly varying stages of completion. This table on the right summarizes the percentage of translations which are complete for each language. If you want to help with these translations, just have a look at the translation wiki, you don't even have to register if you don't want to.
Unfortunately the Farsi translations have now fallen below 10%, which is why they've not been included in version 13. Any thoughts?
New on the list just after version 13.1 was released, is Russian - thank you to the contributor Sergey! These are now included in the recent 13.2 and 13.3 releases. Also new is Danish, which has recently overtaken Farsi.
The following credits also appear in the "About" screen of the GpsPrune application, but it's worth repeating here - grateful thanks to all those who have helped contribute so far, by whatever means!
| GpsPrune code written by : | activityworkshop.net |
| Exif code written by : | Drew Noakes (drewnoakes.com) |
| Some icons taken from : | Eclipse |
| Services : | SRTM data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey usgs.gov, Wikipedia services by geonames, Gpsies services by gpsies.com, maps from Openstreetmap and cloudmade.com |
| Translators : | Ramon (ch), Miguel (es), Inés (es), Piotr (pl), Petrovsk (fr), Josatoc (it), weehal (pl), theYinYeti (fr), Rothermographer (ro), Sam (zh), Rudolph (af), nazotoko (ja), katpatuka (tr), Rémi (fr), Marcus (pt), Ali (fa), Javier (es), Jeroen (nl), prot_d (cz), György (hu), HooAU (ko), Sergey (ru) |
| Technical feedback : | Piotr, freegeographytools, Rudolf, Steven, Jose, Jeshi, Denny, Thomas, Jozef, Gregor, Robert, Jani, zapfen, Joerg |
| Mac know-how : | Tyme, Daniel, Michael, Richard |
| Translations helped by : | Open Office, Gpsdrive, Babelfish, Leo, Launchpad |
| Development tools : | Mandriva Linux, Debian Linux, Sun Java, Eclipse IDE, Svn, Gimp, Inkscape, findbugs |
| Other tools : | Garble, Gpsbabel, Povray, Exiftool, Google Earth, Gnuplot, JOSM |
| Thanks to : | Friends and loved ones, for encouragement and support |
This is more of a longer-term idea, to see if it would be possible to port the Prune code over to a C++/Qt implementation. That way it would be compiled into native, completely free code, and wouldn't need an extra jre to run. Plus the Mandriva team have offered to package it and maintain it in the official Mandriva repositories, making the download and install just a single command. Which would be very cool. (Update: now GpsPrune is already available in the repositories of Debian, Ubuntu and OpenSuse, so clearly a rewrite is not necessary just to get it in the linux package managers!)
Of course it's still extremely early days on this, and so far there's only a little basic prototype which doesn't actually do anything yet. A laughably simple screenshot is shown here:
All it really demonstrates is the compilation into a GUI application, basic layout including menus and toolbar, and basic internationalization.
As an additional thought, maybe such an effort could use Python and Qt instead of C++ - but then it would just need a python runtime instead of a java one. Obviously such an undertaking would require a lot of effort to rework and redevelop the code and at the moment there's little incentive to start again.