Creating POI’s for TomTom Go Devices

Over the last month I have been a bit intriqued by the Tom Tom Go 930 that I bought.  I am a technical kinda guy so ofcourse I would have to look into how to add points of interestes to the device.  Now I know that you can easilly add a POI using the device but you have to do so one by one.

I subscribed to a website that will allow me to download CSV files for different retail outlets, food chains, etc that all contain the latitude and longitude for the locations.  I have a list of all Wal-Mart locations in the USA and even though I could download the Wal-Mart POI for the United States through TomTom HOME, what fun is that?  I wanted to figure out how to create my own POI files so that I could create a set and share them with the TomTom community.

Today I figured out how to create them however I wrote the code in PHP so it’s not that useful outside of the web world.  However now that I know how to create them you can be sure I will be looking into writing an application for Mac OS X that will make life easier for me.  Maybe one day I will share the application with the world (so long as it meets my release expectations). It will be a while as I am still learning Cocoa and do not have much free time outside of work and Family Time.

However you can download my Wal-mart POI by clicking the following button:

Once I make things easier for me I will probably add a nice TomTom page to my site where you will be able to download all of the POI’s that I create. You will also be able to find my POI’s in the TomTom Home software as I will be sharing them with the community there.

One thing that I can say is that TomTom needs to do some work on their documentation or their installation wizard. They state that you can create a CSV file in the format of Longitude,Latitude,Description and then use their wizard to share your POI. This is incorrect because you actually have to use the proper format for OV2 files which is not easy to find.

If you are an established Cocoa Developer and wish to give me a hand with some of the core stuff please leave me a comment and I will get back to you asap.