Bluemapia

July 5th, 2011

Set your default trip to automatically update your trip map

We just realized that many bluemapia users are not aware of a pretty useful function that will allow them to automatically add content to their trip maps.

Go to “My Home” and in your trip list tab, you can simply create a new trip and then click on “Set as Default” to activate a default trip that will be from that moment on, the trip where any new placemark will be posted.

This is particularly useful when you go out at sea since with your mobile phone and Bluemapia iPhone or Bluemapia Mobile you can start posting placemark that will be automatically connected to your default trip and will thus update the trip map.

The good part of the story is that if you embed the map of that trip into your blog, you will see as a result an automatic update of your blog map.

And you can read here how Antti and Minna are using  Bluemapia on board of their Hallberg-Rassy 29, S/Y Dolphin Dance, to share routes and placemarks of their voyages through their blog.

March 29th, 2011

Share your GPS tracks

There are many ways to record tracks of your sailing cruises, races or trips.

You can use a handheld GPS device.
You can use a GPS smartphone like an iPhone, a Blackberry or a Nokia with a GPS app installed.
You can even use the chart plotter on board. Many models allow to save tracks onto a removable data card.

In all of these cases, it will then be possible to transfer your recorded tracks to your PC.

Then you will be ready to share your tracks with your Bluemapia friends.

All we need is your track in GPX format, the GPS Exchange Format that you can upload to Bluemapia to automatically create tracks for your trips.

There are several tools to convert your tracks to the GPX format requested by Bluemapia in case your device adopts a different format. One of the most popular is GPS Babel.
GPS Babel can universally convert waypoints, tracks, and routes between popular GPS receivers and mapping programs.
It also has powerful manipulation tools for such data.

Now, imagine your are planning your next summer cruise in Greece and you have found on Bluemapia an interesting track for the same area.

All you have to do is to download the track and load it into your GPS device to take that track with you.

Here are some of the best examples from our users:
Grenadine Trip with GPS track (240.9 miles)
Ligurian Sea to Capraia (151 miles)
UK Channel Crossing (307.4 miles)

Start sharing your tracks.

Enjoy your sailing adventures!

Bluemapia Staff

January 18th, 2010

Bluemapia sponsors People’s Boat

We are now a new happy sponsor of People’s Boat, the new Alex Alley’s boat to participate to the next Ocean Global Race.

The cost to run the campaign is high and Alex needs more sponsors.

Entry level to buy a pixel 5×5 cm on his boat is 25 £.

He is a great guy and at the end of the race the boat will be sold and a donation will be made to charity.

That’s the main reason why we decided to sponsor his adventure.

Join us and buy your space!

December 10th, 2009

New widget to embed nearby places by bluemapia in your website/blog

Dear bloggers, website developers, friends,
if you were wondering how to include bluemapia places in your website, here is the answer.

We have developed a new widget that for a given latitude/longitude will return the nearest places found in the bluemapia database. You can also define the number of columns and rows.

Here is an example:

And this is the code to embed into your page:
<iframe src="http://www.bluemapia.com/widgets/nearby.php?lat=42.6&lng=10.6&cols=1&rows=3" marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 frameborder=0 scrolling=no width=610 height=250></iframe>

Parameters are latitude (lat), longitude (lng), number of columns (cols) and number of rows (rows).
The width of a column is 300 pixels.

Have Fun!
Amerigo

November 27th, 2009

We are ready to hear from you!

In the first year at Bluemapia we’ve observed our community’s growing interest.
Many of you just registered while others actively contributed with the creation of content for the simple reason that it is useful to other sailors. What a satisfaction, indeed!

But we want to do better.
We know we can do better with your help.
So we thought it’d be a great idea to open up to hear your feedback.

We simply ask you to add a comment to this post with your ideas about the site, the content, the mobile applications, what you miss most, what you hate and what you like. Anything that could help us understand how to make Bluemapia the best open cruising guide and social mapping site for boaters on the web.
For the benefit of all of us.

We count on you.
Add your comment below.

Have Fun!
Bluemapia Staff

November 2nd, 2009

Windfinder weather forecast for your favourite marina now available on Bluemapia

After Bluemapia Mobile, wind and weather forecasts are now additionally available on the Bluemapia web site and iPhone application.
Jonas Kaufmann at Windfinder has developed another of his fantastic widgets and thanks to their new forecast capabilities, we are now able to embed weather forecasts in the Bluemapia web pages.
To achieve this, all the Bluemapia marinas and ports locations have been imported into the Windfinder weather forecast database so that weather forecasts for the same exact locations are now available at the bottom of the Bluemapia pages. You can see here below how the page looks like.

For all the other placemarks and pois, the page shows the weather forecast from the nearest weather station, few miles away in most cases.

What if your favourite marina is not on Bluemapia yet?
Well, just register for a Bluemapia account and create a placemark or POI for that marina. Windfinder is web integrated with Bluemapia and their weather forecast database is periodically updated to include our new marinas.

Weather forecasts are also available on Bluemapia for iPhone. Another step to bring information straight to the cockpit of your boats. Search for a place by name or using the nearby function and open the details page of a place. The forecast is there just after the comments.

And our effort is not over. Bluemapia content will be soon integrated into Windfinder pages.

Stay tuned!

October 16th, 2009

Bluemapia for iPhone now on the AppStore

We have finally released it.
Bluemapia for iPhone is now available on the AppStore!

With Bluemapia for iPhone boaters can now use their GPS enabled iPhone to send pictures and location information straight from the cockpit of their boats, or even view localised photos and information contributed by fellow users.
Bluemapia for iPhone includes:

GPS - see the current latitude and longitude as well as speed and direction.

UPLOAD - take a photo, add a title and some text to describe the place and then upload your content to the public map to share this place with all the other boaters. Good descriptions such as the type of bottom for an anchorage or the services available in a marina will be highly appreciated by the rest of the community.

NEARBY - find places near you visited and uploaded by other sailors: Placemarks and Points of Interest in the range of 1, 5, 10 or 50 nautical miles with distance and direction from your current position.

SEARCH - enter the name of a place to find Placemarks and Points of Interest in the Bluemapia public map.

SETTINGS - change the measurement system from Imperial to Metric and select between different coordinate formats.

Through Creative Commons licensing, everything you upload to Bluemapia is yours.
We simply provide the platform, and hope it inspires you and your friends to keep sailing and share your adventures with the world.

Go to the AppStore now and download it!

July 5th, 2009

Windfinder weather now available on Bluemapia Mobile

For those who still do not know Windfinder, Windfinder is a website that provides real time wind reports and forecasts for hundreds of spots around the world available in several formats including mobile pages and SMS.

I’m therefore where happy to announce that thanks to the joint effort with Jonas Kauffman by Windfinder, it is now possible to view on the map the Windfinder weather stations with Bluemapia Mobile. Once displayed on the map, you can open the Windfinder mobile page of each single station to analize current and forecasted weather data provided by Windfinder.
Take a look at a video to see how it works:

Bluemapia Mobile Beta2 June 2009: View Windfinder weather stations on Bluemapia from Bluemapia on Vimeo.

You don’t new to upgrade the Bluemapia Mobile software to have access to this new feature. Just be sure you have the latest Beta 2 version and start a search to update the list of services.
We are working to add some new and exciting services, so stay tuned to keep you up to date.

Buon Vento (Fair Wind)

Marcello

June 6th, 2009

A new Bluemapia Mobile version is now available

Download Bluemapia Mobile 0.9.6 Beta 2 (June 2009)

Dear friends,
We are very pleased to announce our latest and improved version of Bluemapia Mobile.

What’s new on Bluemapia Mobile? After extensive planning and development, a list of new features have just gone live.
Here’s a quick rundown on what’s new:

New Search
You can now search by entering the name of a place. If a result is not found on bluemapia, then we search for that place in google and return the result on the map.

Wikipedia’s georeferenced articles
Just select Wikipedia in the “Others” field of the search dialog and you will see the wikipedia icon on the map to indicate a georeferenced article that you can read directly on your mobile device.

Application Programming Interface for external layer providers
In addition to the Wikipedia layer, we have now an API to make new layers available from Bluemapia Mobile. Please contact info@bluemapia.com if you want to propose your layer service to Bluemapia.

Update Web Servers URLs
You can now choose “Update” to get the latest definitions of the web map server URLs that we keep up-to-date on the bluemapia server. By default only OpenStreetMap is available after the installation. Also, if you know the address of a good web map server, you can now manually add that URL to the list of the available servers following the bluemapia format specified here:

Single Create Placemark command including Send
You now have a consistent and rapid way to shoot a photo that will create a placemark at the current coordinates (that is also your current position if the GPS is active) and send the placemark to the bluemapia site or decide to save it locally on your phone. All in the same operation.

The new Bluemapia Mobile is now available here for download.

With these new features Bluemapia Mobile is now the best Geo-Browser available for Windows Mobile. The Bluemapia Mobile Open Source project is still hosted by sourceforge, with a GPL license based uniquely on open source portable libraries.

Register now to get full access to the bluemapia mobile features!

And if you need support please send us an e-mail at support@bluemapia.com or post a message on our GetSatisfaction page.

June 1st, 2009

Follow Nick Cross the Pacific

Those who have followed Bluemapia in the last several months on the site’s blog and Twitter already know that Nick from Bigoceans who is working for Bluemapia managing and moderating online content, is now departing for his solo crossing of the Pacific ocean.

Bluemapia decided to sponsor his trans-Pacific voyage and keep him sailing.
If you’re not sure what Nick is attempting to do, he’s sailing singlehanded from Europe to Australia. In 2008, he departed Europe, and sailed to New York via the Caribbean - Now, in 2009, the voyage will continue on, with a solo crossing of the Pacific on his British sailing vessel named ‘Constellation, a Contessa 26′ from 1972.

We are following his crossing on this page, updating the map with his last known position and placemarks.

Click on the placemark icon to see what Nick reported.

identifies the last updated placemark.
Pacific Crossing at Bluemapia

Click icons to view more - Map created by Bluemapia

Here Nick is in San Francisco, out of Golden Gate, during his final sailing tests before departing to Hawaii beginning of June.

BUON VENTO NICK
Marcello & Massimo

Check this explanatory page to discover how you can embed maps on your site’s pages, like we have done here.