GPX POI on Google Play is an Android App which is designed to help identify 'Points of Interest' (POIs) along a GPS route. Chris had it developed when he found the route planning for the 7,390 km race from Norway to Spain a bit tedious.
The concept is straight forward. You load the GPX file that you want to ride. You then load an Open Source file with the POIs. Having defined the 'zone' around the GPX file to look for POIs, it then tells you how far it is to the POIs ahead. It will also produce a table of POIs in terms of the number of POIs of different types that are ahead in distance bands. The screens below show the program.
Above is the Indian Pacific Wheel Race GPX with the POIs.
The distance to travel to the different POIs.
It is pretty straight forward to use:
- Create a folder on your phone for the GPX tracks. Copy your GPS track there.
- Create a folder called POI and download the appropriate POIs to the folder from http://download.mapsforge.org/pois/.
- Load the GPX track.
- Load the POI file.
Be patient (see below).
You need to tell the app how far off the road to search for POIs. Be warned: if this is too large it takes a loooooonnnnnng time to load the data!
Finally, the POIs are from Mapforge and are all Open Source. Unfortunately, they are often for a whole country so it can also take a while to load things.
It is possible to export the POI distances to Excel for planning.
For more macro planning, it will tell you how many POIs are ahead of you in different distance bands. Handy for when you are tired at the end of the day and trying to decide how much further to ride.
GPX POIs is a simple app. OSMAnd+ is a fully featured app which has POIs etc. Just doesn't give it to you concisely for the distance ahead. Best to race with both.