With the New Year brings new ideas, and today we would like to announce we are launching our OSM Canal Map for Garmin GPS units.  As with all our maps this is initially UK based only, although we are looking to expand and offer more countries during 2009 (if you have any particular requests, please create an account in the forums and ask for your country).

The Canal Map is a little experimental at the moment, and we would welcome feedback good and bad in our forums.  We started with a similar profile as our UK OSM Cycle Map for Garmin, and de-emphasised the cycle routes (although they still appear on the Canal Map to show our Canal Map users easy routes into town centres), and added a number of very specific canal / river POIs (Points of Interest) as well.

Most of the additional POIs are self-explanatory, using the standard Garmin symbols for Marinas, Boatyards etc. but we discovered Garmin did not have a symbol for locks, so we have used the White Navaid symbol for this.  If any Canal Map users can find us a more appropriate symbol, we’ll happily change over.  Also, as OSM maps each individual lock gate, we often find at least 2 occurrences of the lock name in close proximity, which can make the name look blurred.  We’re looking into whether there is anything we can do to improve this, but do let us know whether it’s a real issue or not.

Of course, if you zoom in sufficiently far, you can actually see the individual lock gates…

We believe this is the first UK Canal Map for GPS devices created using OSM data, and hope it proves popular.

As always, this is available for download alongside our other OSM Maps for Garmin here.

A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes to automate the creation of these maps, and also the backend support to allow us to release these maps securely. We’re hoping to be able to announce a beta program for these maps in the near future to ensure there are no major problems with these maps before we start making them available. Please keep an eye on the homepage, and look out for further announcements in the forums.

We’ve launched our own forums to allow users and developers to discuss all aspects of this website, the products and projects we will be offering, and general chat about mapping, GPS devices, and other related activities (eg geocaching).

Join us at forums.mapomatic.net, although you will need to register a username and password to be able to join in the discussions.

You’ll need to register with a username and password to be able to talk in the forums.