This evening I took a break from the development of Breadcrumb NavXT 2.1 and played with my GPX reader/plotter. Previously, on a 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 computer running linux and in Firefox 2.0 the maximum number of coordinates that can plotted using the GPolyline element was about 200. This was the max that maintained reasonable usability (the actual limit was somewhere in the 300s where it no longer rendered). With my laptop, a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo, still has a rather low limit of about 250 while maintaining usability. Some of my runs are over 300 track points, and these were not even that long of routes. I’m talking about somewhere between three and four miles.
Obviously this is not good, and that is why WP Trainer was not released last year. The solution to this problem is dynamic loading of the points, and using semi-sophisticated algorithms to remove “unneeded” points, such as ones that are outliers and ones that are in the middle of a straight line. Naturally, this is not a trivial thing to implement. Thus, it may be June before something is together for general consumption.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]