I few days back I had talked about my pursuit of better maps for India on my N95 in the post Mapping India.
Although I was more or less satisfied with MG Maps running Yahoo India Maps, there was one drawback in application which was preventing it to be a perfect mapping and navigation solution for the Indian user. As I had mentioned in the earlier post, the driving directions feature is still not available in India since MG Maps uses Google for all its searches by default including routes (Google does not have driving directions/ route search for India yet). So even if you get detailed maps using Yahoo India maps, with your current location, speed heading etc on the screen, you still cannot use MG Maps as a GPS navigation system.
I posted a request to the developer of MG Maps to include Yahoo India maps in the search feature of the application and found that there is thread on the subject the forums section of MG Maps. At the forum I also discovered that there a very talented person who goes by the alias spadival has managed to create a pipe on Yahoo using Yahoo India Maps to get driving directions for India. Click here to read more about pipes.You can find the pipe created by spadival here.
Now what this pipe does is, it uses Yahoo Maps India to search for directions which are fed into the “from” and “to” fields and gives an output on the map. The best part is that the output can also be saved as a kml file which can be loaded to the phone running MG Maps and then the application loads the file and the way-points are show on the phone.
Here is a detailed “how to” on plotting your route in advance, sending it to the phone and then taking it up from there:
