I just bought a Garmin 60csx, a top-of-the-line GPS receiver that happens to only have a USB interface. Is that such a strange thing? After all, digital cameras, printers, mice, and just about every other device made in the last five years has been USB-only. But apparently the same doesn't hold for GPS receivers. Only in the past year or two have receivers started to support GPS at all (I guess Garmin, Magellen, etc., finally noticed that their customers' PCs didn't even have serial ports anymore). Garmin had the balls to make their very newest models USB-only, something I applaud them for. However, even though GPS software makers have had a couple years to make the USB transition, and several years before that to know the day would come eventually, no OS-X GPS software fully supports USB.

That is, except for LoadMyTracks! I was thrilled when I discovered this program, because it is currently the only OS-X solution for transferring tracks with my Garmin 60csx. Other software such as Mac GPS Pro apparently works with USB devices, but only if you buy a special serial adaptor cable. What a pain. Garmin has promised to support OS-X later this year, but I don't want to wait until then. I'm impatient. The makers of LoadMyTracks are the only people who care about me.

Well, besides being the only software that will work with my device, LoadMyTracks is an extremely simple yet useful program. It's got practically zero learning curve — just hit "Aquire" and you're done.

It helpfully sets the default filename of your downloaded track files to the current date and time. This way I can have an archive of all my tracks.

I use it mostly for the GPX support, which lets me send tracks to other software such as GPSPhotoLinker or online tools like Yuan.CC. The Google Earth support is kind of a novelty for me — it's fun to load your tracks and say "Hey, look, that's exactly where I was!" I'm sure it is actually useful for some people.

The quality of LoadMyTracks seems just fine. The program is so simple that there's not much that can go wrong. I haven't had any problems yet, even though it's currently "Beta".

I haven't had much opportunity to test the new track sending feature, but I've used LoadMyTracks to upload geocaching waypoints without any problems.