Nokia Maploader For Mac Introduced, Cue In Heart Attack
Ever since I wrote about my fascination with Nokia’s Multimedia Transfer for the Mac and my irritation with the lack of many other facets of interaction between my S60-powered devices and my Mac, things have been going crazy on Nokia’s side. First there was Charlie’s reply to my post, then we found out that Nokia were at some point looking for a software engineer for their Mac Ovi Suite, and now this!
Yes, the Betalab teams just opened the curtains on the Maploader for Mac, one of the software I have been eagerly asking for. What does Maploader do? Well instead of downloading Nokia’s Maps over the air, and fattening your data bill, Maploader allows you to download the maps on your computer then manage them and send them over to your S60 device. Simple. There has been a workaround for this on the Mac, but it just gave you the files to dump into the memory card, and no option to manage different maps which meant that in order to remove one country’s map, you had to remove all of the others. Plain annoying.
The Maploader *should* solve this problem, I have just downloaded it, and will give it a run later today. It requires Nokia Multimedia Transfer, as well as a memory card (or the built-in storage on the N95 8gb and N96). If you have a Mac and an S60 device, you can download it here and try it, and don’t forget to give your feedback to the Betalabs team in order for them to improve the application. It’s a mere 2.3MB installation file: I don’t know anything about computer application development, but it makes me wonder why the Windows version is a whopping 13.5MB .
Dotsisx wrote:
>There has been a workaround for this on the Mac,
>but it just gave you the files to dump into the memory card,
>and no option to manage different maps
>which meant that in order to remove one country's map,
>you had to remove all of the others."
That's not correct. Nokia's own Map Loader for PC has no option to remove (or even update) one map without removing all the others, but the workaround is way more flexible. If you use the links on http://nokiamaps.site666.info you can add, update, and remove single maps without touching the others. Removing a single map requires a look into the zip archive to figure out which files belong to which country, but it can be done if you really want to.
Newer is not always better. When Nokia introduced version 2 of Nokia Maps they also replaced most if not all of their old TeleAtlas maps with Navteq maps. For some countries this was not an improvement. The workaround allows you to "downgrade" these new maps to the older, better maps. Nokia's own Map Loader won't let you do that.