Tyre: Where TomTom and Google meet

What do you do when you believe something is missing from your favourite navigational device, and it doesn't look like the manufacturer will fix it in the near future? Right! – if you can, you do it yourself! YourNAV spoke to Jan Boersma, the man behind the Tyre program. 'Tyre' stands for 'Trace Your Route Everywhere', and it's where TomTom and Google meet…

BMW

Jan Boersma is a vicar in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, and has recently become a true motorcycle fanatic. He says, "In the spring of 2004, I started riding a motorcycle. In one word: fantastic! Some of the thrills might be down to my bike, a BMW K1100LT, which is responsible for a fair bit of the enjoyment."

Another part of the fun is provided by the TomTom RIDER, which he bought early last year. "The RIDER is an enormous step forward if you compare it to a PDA or an 'ordinary' TomTom unit on your bike, because those systems are a lot more fragile and are not waterproof. That's without mentioning the efforts you have to go through just to be able to hear the spoken instructions on the road. It's for all those reasons that I purchased a RIDER."

Remarks

In spite of all his enthusiasm, Boersma also has a few reservations: "If the company that manufactured the RIDER had developed it in cooperation with real motorcyclists, the contents of the box would have looked a lot different. TomTom still claims that the RIDER has been developed specifically for use on two wheels, but that's only partially true."

With regards to the hardware, Boersma accepts the device is durable, waterproof, easy to install and provides spoken instructions inside the helmet. But the software is a different thing altogether. Here, he believes TomTom has failed miserably:

"As every biker will tell you, motorcyclists use their bike mainly for recreational purposes. They aren't just used to get from A to B as fast as possible. They're used to drive on minor roads, with nice scenery, as a form of relaxation. For this, the best roads are not the straight ones, but the ones with as many bends as possible, where you need to keep your hands on the handlebars all the time."

To get the best out of the RIDER, Boersma believes that its manufacturer should have provided a means to allow the user to plot such routes. The basic software is there, in the form of itineraries, but the way they are set up is far from ideal. "Waypoint after waypoint needs to be entered via the small touch screen. A whole lot of fiddling! In the beginning I entered several routes that way, but after a while your fingers really start to feel sore…."

TomTom HOME

Fortunately, TomTom's current desktop software, TomTom HOME, provides some improvement: "With this software, routes can be plotted using the mouse on the computer screen. But getting your waypoint on the correct spot is still very difficult. I still have to wade through three or more sub-menus before I finally can add another waypoint to the list. Also, accurately locating such a waypoint is a true art!"

It didn't take Boersma long to realise what he wanted: a good, software-based map on his computer. "Such a map would allow me to create a route which I could then transfer to the RIDER. The lack of such software started to weigh heavier and heavier on my mind."

But Boersma isn't one to sit back and complain, he decided to go looking for suitable map software. "Such software does exist, but most of it was not a good choice for me. For one, most of it came at a hefty cost, and, after purchasing such software, there's still the question of whether it would be compatible with the RIDER. In most cases, it wasn't."

Google Earth

In his search for software, Boersma stumbled over a link to Google Earth. "I downloaded and installed it, but at first I wasn't impressed, and I quickly removed the program.After a while though, I decided to give it a second chance. The big advantage was, and still is, that it's free, and it also has lots of features, which are enhanced with every new version.

One of the features of Google Earth is the positioning of so-called 'placemarks', the Google-term for waypoints. And a collection of those "placemarks' can create a route…

"Once I got to that stage, I still had to overcome an important hurdle: how do I transfer such a collection of placemarks to my RIDER? At first I looked for a quick and dirty solution, and I came up with the clipboard! Just like most other computer programs, GE is capable of copying data to the clipboard." This turned out to be the turning point. Once on the clipboard the placemarks were in a easily readable format, and 'all' that was now required was a small program which could transfer that data to the RIDER. "Such a program didn't exist" says Boersma, "but besides motorcycling I have another hobby: programming. So creating that program didn't take me too long". And so... Tyre was born!

The story

The rest of the story was really simply adding some 'eye-candy' to the program. But Boersma also worked hard on that. "Once the program was finished, I thought it would be a good idea to make it available to other bikers as I thought they would also find it handy. Well, they did. The number of hits on my site grew each day, and the number of mails I received grew on a daily basis."

It was also quickly apparent that not only RIDER users loved the program, but also regular GO and ONE users as well as those with PDA versions of the TomTom software. Their enthusiastic responses encouraged Boersma to develop his handy little program even further.

Spanish

A large step was made when Boersma received an email from a certain Jose Manuel, who offered to translate the program into Spanish and Catalan. "Well yes, why not?" thought Boersma. "It took me a while to change the code in such a way that it could be used with different languages, but eventually I managed to get it working. By then, others had also started to translate Tyre into German, French, Italian and Portuguese."

A lot of other user suggestions ended up in the software, and a lot of new options were added. If you are interested in the development of the program, you can read more about it on Boersma's History Page. "The thing I like most about Tyre now, is how easy it is to use. The user-friendliness has increased hugely since the first version. This is the general feeling of all its users: there's no fuss, you just use it and it does what it promises: putting routes on your RIDER!"

Chain Routes

One important innovation was added following a suggestion from another user - Dick Van Laar. He thought up the idea of a 'Chain Route'. He realised that if it was now easy to create a route and save it into a file, it should also be pretty simple to create one large route, made up of several smaller routes linked together.

"Most motorcyclists know their own local area very well. This knowledge can be shared, by letting a lot of users create routes that they enjoy, and then these routes can be coupled together into one big 'chained route'. Even better: the more links available, the easier it becomes to create a nice consolidated route for yourself. This idea has got off to a good start, and more details can be found on the Chain Route Page (for now, Dutch only).

The Future

It's difficult to predict how the program will develop in the future. Now that Boersma's little piece of code has grown into a serious bit of software, it also has a reputation to keep up. According to Boersma: "Sometimes it's the little things. For example, in the last version I changed the term 'waypoint' to a term that sounded more Dutch. But sometimes, larger alterations are necessary, and those take time. For example, now that the program has grown into a large and serious piece of software, I want to look into other ways of transferring waypoints from Google Earth to the Tyre software. Although the clipboard might be easy, it's not really a very professional approach".

Boersma also thinks it's important to keep control of the program development. "Unfortunately, most programs eventually become slow and bloated because of all the new features that get added. I want to prevent that. But on the other hand, I also want to fulfil the wishes of Tyre's users, and do something about their suggestions and ideas. After all, they are the ones that have to use the program."

Boersma is doing his best to avoid this trap, and so the newest version of Tyre will contain the option to save files into the GPS Exchange (*.gpx) and Google Earth (*.kml) formats, but no others. "I didn't want to develop a 'general' piece of GPS software, but to concentrate on the TomTom, because that was what I was trying to fix in the first place. However, I made an obvious exception for Google Earth and GPS Exchange: Tyre needs Google Earth to function, and GPS Exchange is very widely used to swap waypoints and routes from one system to another. I thought compatibility with those formats would be handy".

Several users also want to see the created routes displayed more realistically in Google Earth itself. They can be shown already, but only with straight lines, joining one waypoint directly to the next. Boersma sees this as a challenge: "In the future, I want to work out how I can force Google Earth to display the routes along the path of existing roads".

But Boersma's biggest wish is simply to develop a nice and straightforward program that does what it promises. "And who knows: maybe it'll be shipped with every new TomTom RIDER, on a CD inside the box…" he says.

I you want to find out more about Tyre, please visit Jan Boersma's site!