Garmin Adventures

Former Member over 13 years ago

Any scheduled maintenance on the Garmin Adventure servers will occur Tuedays at 7:45am CT. Most maintenance down times will be less than 20 min. If you are experiencing an issue with adventures during this time, please try again later.

More on adventures here: adventures.garmin.com

New firmware with adventure support has been released for:

Montana
62 Series (includes 78 series)
Oregon x50 Series
Dakota

“Garmin Adventures” is a new feature that allows you to easily share trips and photos and lets you find Adventures by other Garmin users. You can download a track from your GPS to BaseCamp, add some photos, videos and annotations; upload the trip as an Adventure and then share it via the Garmin Adventures web site with friends and family. BaseCamp allows you to author Adventures, and use a playback feature so you can re-live your trip. In the near future, Garmin devices will add support for Adventures as well.

The BaseCamp 4.0.0.4 gives you an early preview into Garmin Adventures. Please let us know how you like it and what you think we can improve. BaseCamp 4.0.0.4 will lead you to short surveys that will help us make Adventures a better product. If you have a minute to spare, please fill out these surveys. Thanks.

Finding Adventures

You can use BaseCamp’s find feature to locate other Adventures. You can download Adventures that you would like to take a closer look at. If you'd like to follow an adventure, just transfer it to your device.

Adventure Display and Playback

You can view details about an Adventure, and use the Playback feature. The Playback experience will be better if you have a Topo map and BirdsEye imagery. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8al8CHqOBmg for an example.

Creating an Adventure

You can create an Adventure from any track, either from My Collection or directly from your device. BaseCamp will locate photos and waypoints in the vicinity of the Adventure track. You can add annotations, YouTube videos and additional photos. It is important that you enter a good description so other can better experience your Adventure. Note that you can pick from the prepopulated list of activities or simply enter your own.

Each Adventure has its own database, so you can play around with your Adventure’s data without making any changes in your data in My Collection.

Publishing an Adventure

Once you are happy with your adventure, you can publish it. You can share a published adventure with friends and family (http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/eracerz/hanakapiai-falls-trail-hike-2), you can link the adventure to your favorite social media site, you can use it to back-up your trip and download it again on a different machine and you can help fellow Adventurers find interesting stuff to do.

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

It's on the list to fix for BaseCamp 4.3. Maybe it will make it into a 4.2.x maintenance release, but no promises.

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

Is it possible to search by activity?

0 MYTHICLIONMAN over 12 years ago

I just tried publishing a Garmin Adventure (located here). I was looking for a service that would fill in for some of the deficiencies of EveryTrail which appears to have stagnated. I really liked being able to prepare the Adventure in a native app instead of in my web browser, and for the most part I preferred the public web page created for the Adventure. It's easier to navigate for users than EveryTrail, and makes it easier to focus on the story and the pictures but still makes the map very accessible. There are a few problems, some of which are showstoppers however.

1. I can enter paragraphs in Base Camp and they show up fine there, but when I view the Overview text online it has no paragraphs or line breaks, which makes it unreadable. For this reason alone I wouldn't share the link to my Adventure. I've seen this mentioned in this thread before, but there was no response.
2. When I scroll the web view down far enough that I can see the elevation plot the performance in my browser tanks. I thought this might be a browser issue, but I've tried with both Safari and Chrome (on OS X 10.7.5), and both browsers become unusable as soon as the elevation plot is visible. This happens on all Adventures that I look at.
3. Even though my language is English I'm Canadian so I use the metric system, but the trip always displays distances in miles. It would be nice if I could set a default unit for display that viewers could change if they wanted. (It would also be nice if I could set a personal distance preference that would be used for all Adventures I view if the map creator hadn't specified a preference).
4. It would be nice to be able to specify 'default' values for many of the display parameters. The mile markers on the map create a bit of clutter as do the picture locations so it would be nice to turn layers on and off by default (users could still change the settings to display these layers). It would also be nice to specify which map (satellite, terrain, street) was used by default.
5. If I upload multiple tracks for an Adventure I can only select one as the 'main' track. Since my track was a multi-day canoe trip I created a separate track for each day of the trip and gave each day a different colour. To work around the main track limitation I created an additional track combining all days of the trip and made it invisible. This works on my computer, but when I view the Adventure online I still only see one coloured track. I don't know if this is the aggregate track that I made (which should be invisible) or if it is my per-day tracks all rendered with the same colour. In either case it's a lot easier to visualize the trip when each day has a different colour. This isn't a show stopper, but it sure would be nice to have.
6. There's no way to add text formatting to the overview text. (This isn't that big a deal, and I realize that there might be issues rendering formatted text on devices. Still it would be nice to be able to specify titles to break the text into sections if full formatting isn't possible.)
7. It would be nice to be able to click on a picture and see it at the full resolution that was uploaded in the Adventure. I know I can change the map size to make the pictures larger or smaller, but this still limits the size of the photo based on the size of the browser window.
8. There doesn't seem to be a way to find other Adventures posted by the same user. Not a big deal, but it would be nice.

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

Thank you for your feedback. We will work on improvements.

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

1. I can enter paragraphs in Base Camp and they show up fine there, but when I view the Overview text online it has no paragraphs or line breaks, which makes it unreadable. For this reason alone I wouldn't share the link to my Adventure. I've seen this mentioned in this thread before, but there was no response.

Sometimes you can "correct" this with a bit of HTML code in your text. Try using the codes for "line break" and "paragraph" and see if that helps.

For any line where you want a line break you can place " ". This will simply cause the text to break to the next line. If you put two of them together, eg. , you will get a blank line, sort of like a paragraph break.

If you want to control paragraphs properly you can use the paragraph codes, Paragraph text.

No guarantees but sometimes you have to force the line break and paragraph formatting in pages that are displayed with HTML because they are different codes in the text editor (in this case Basecamp's) and the server software guys couldn't be bothered to translate them into HTML when they put your text into the web page that gets built.

...ken...

0 MYTHICLIONMAN over 12 years ago

Sometimes you can "correct" this with a bit of HTML code in your text. Try using the codes for "line break" and "paragraph" and see if that helps

Thanks, that worked. I never thought of entering HTML in the edit field in Base Camp. Perhaps it should say that it's an HTML field somewhere. It is a bit weird that entering line breaks as paragraphs show up in Base Camp but not when published online. Rendering the preview text in html in Base Camp would address this.

I also investigated the browser performance issue a bit. It turns out that both Safari and Chrome (that use WebKit for rendering) are pretty slow with large SVG files. If I cut the elevation profile SVG out and open just that in either of those browsers performance is quite bad. But if I open it in Firefox it's very snappy. Unfortunately a lot of the people who view my trips use Safari. Perhaps even more unfortunate is that SVG really makes sense in this application and WebKit should get its act together.

0 Chuckcoffee over 11 years ago

Link for Publsihed adventure?

MYTHICLIONMAN

How did you find that link(in brackets in your post) for your published adventure.

I just tried publishing a Garmin Adventure (located here). I was looking for a service that would fill in for some of the deficiencies of EveryTrail which appears to have stagnated. I really liked being able to prepare the Adventure in a native app instead of in my web browser, and for the most part I preferred the public web page created for the Adventure. It's easier to navigate for users than EveryTrail, and makes it easier to focus on the story and the pictures but still makes the map very accessible. There are a few problems, some of which are showstoppers however.

1. I can enter paragraphs in Base Camp and they show up fine there, but when I view the Overview text online it has no paragraphs or line breaks, which makes it unreadable. For this reason alone I wouldn't share the link to my Adventure. I've seen this mentioned in this thread before, but there was no response.
2. When I scroll the web view down far enough that I can see the elevation plot the performance in my browser tanks. I thought this might be a browser issue, but I've tried with both Safari and Chrome (on OS X 10.7.5), and both browsers become unusable as soon as the elevation plot is visible. This happens on all Adventures that I look at.
3. Even though my language is English I'm Canadian so I use the metric system, but the trip always displays distances in miles. It would be nice if I could set a default unit for display that viewers could change if they wanted. (It would also be nice if I could set a personal distance preference that would be used for all Adventures I view if the map creator hadn't specified a preference).
4. It would be nice to be able to specify 'default' values for many of the display parameters. The mile markers on the map create a bit of clutter as do the picture locations so it would be nice to turn layers on and off by default (users could still change the settings to display these layers). It would also be nice to specify which map (satellite, terrain, street) was used by default.
5. If I upload multiple tracks for an Adventure I can only select one as the 'main' track. Since my track was a multi-day canoe trip I created a separate track for each day of the trip and gave each day a different colour. To work around the main track limitation I created an additional track combining all days of the trip and made it invisible. This works on my computer, but when I view the Adventure online I still only see one coloured track. I don't know if this is the aggregate track that I made (which should be invisible) or if it is my per-day tracks all rendered with the same colour. In either case it's a lot easier to visualize the trip when each day has a different colour. This isn't a show stopper, but it sure would be nice to have.
6. There's no way to add text formatting to the overview text. (This isn't that big a deal, and I realize that there might be issues rendering formatted text on devices. Still it would be nice to be able to specify titles to break the text into sections if full formatting isn't possible.)
7. It would be nice to be able to click on a picture and see it at the full resolution that was uploaded in the Adventure. I know I can change the map size to make the pictures larger or smaller, but this still limits the size of the photo based on the size of the browser window.
8. There doesn't seem to be a way to find other Adventures posted by the same user. Not a big deal, but it would be nice.

0 Former Member over 11 years ago

Thanks, that worked. I never thought of entering HTML in the edit field in Base Camp. Perhaps it should say that it's an HTML field somewhere. It is a bit weird that entering line breaks as paragraphs show up in Base Camp but not when published online. Rendering the preview text in html in Base Camp would address this.

This is a case of the developers of both the Basecamp functions and the server side functions being sloppy. The Basecamp developers can't be bothered to find out that the stuff is going to be displayed in HTML and make sure that their WYSIWYG editor codes get translated to the proper HTML equivalents. And the server side developers can't be bothered to check to see that the Basecamp developers are passing them HTML and, if not, doing the necessary translation themselves.

They both dropped the ball on what is a very trivial function to place on one end or the other.

I discovered this sloppiness in, of all places, an online trouble report system. You take the trouble to space a trouble report so it's easy to read all the important points and then discover the support tech can't figure out what you're describing because it all got jumbled together into one long "paragraph" when it got copied from the online form with its WYSISYG editor into the text blob in the tracking database. Then the techs read the trouble reports with a browser (HTML).

At least in that case one tech was bright enough to know what was going on and asked if I could insert the HTML codes since there was nothing he could do about the situation (apparently the support techs had been complaining about the problem for over two years with no success). This works because the codes are just text to the WYSIWYG editor so it won't spindle, fold or mutilate them.

Soon after that, I discovered that Garmin's trouble reporting system (among a number of others) did the same thing. I don't know if Garmin has fixed it in the meantime. I gave up trying to use their online trouble reporting system a long time ago.

So any time I run into that situation the first thing I try is inserting the HTML codes. It's really discouraging how often it works. Discouraging because it's 2013 and the issue of translating from a WYSIWYG form editor to HTML display feature is so early 90s. It's about as fundamental as plugging in your computer or putting gas in your car; it should be automatic. There might be an excuse for the Basecamp developers but there is none for the developers on the server side not catching it before it ever went live. This stuff is their bread and butter.

...ken...

0 MYTHICLIONMAN over 11 years ago

MYTHICLIONMAN

How did you find that link(in brackets in your post) for your published adventure.

I clicked on the "Share this adventure with your friends" button (It's a small icon of a box with an arrow coming out of it in the upper right corner of the adventure text) and selected email from the list of options. That opened a web page to send an email and the link is at the top of the page.

0 cliffrosson over 11 years ago

Posted my first adventure the other day. Wow. What an amazing way to share your trips with friends. I do have a few questions though.

A) How long does your published adventure link last online?
B) Is there an easy way to search and explore adventures? Perhaps rate and comment without opening basecamp?