Tag: GPS

My girlfriend recently took me on a long road trip through rural Canada. We had a blast, but one of the trickiest parts was navigating. Canada is vast, and we had to keep flipping back and forth between differently-scaled maps. If only we had known about GMapCatcher before the trip, things could have been much simpler. In a nutshell, GMapCatcher lets you select an area of land and a range of ...

Cheating at Foursquare has always been insanely easy. Check in somewhere you're not, get the points, take unearned mayorships ... no problem. In fact, there are even some loathsome new third-party services that let you pay for mayorships. Well, Foursquare has had enough of that, especially since businesses now offer real-world perks based on checkins. They've implemented a new anti-cheating ...

I'm directionally impaired. It might not be a real ailment, but for me it might as well be. Without a map, I couldn't find my way out of a room with one door. So for me, the built-in Google Maps functionality in my iPhone has changed my life. While I love Google Maps, one thing I don't love about it is the lack of voice directions. While driving, I find that I spend far too much time studying the ...

Two of my favorite Windows tinkerers -- Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng -- got tired of waiting for someone, somewhere to make use of Windows 7's cool, built-in sensor support. Rather than twiddle their thumbs like certain non-coders who are writing about them (read: me), they decided to do something about it. Enter Geosense, a free download for Windows 7 which allows you to activate location ...

A big part of getting a location-based app right is -- shocker! -- providing an accurate location. Gowalla is using that principle to get a leg up in its battle with Foursquare for location-based check-in supremacy. Gowalla now uses Skyhook in its Android app, which means it's providing some of the best location data around. The Android app is currently in beta, although it's not highly ...

If you can't stand to hear another word from the obnoxious voice that delivers turn-by-turn directions on your GPS device, you may have a way out. If you've got a Garmin GPS, you can use the new Garmin Voice Studio to replace the device's recorded phrases - "recalculating!" - with recordings of your own. Personally, I can't stand the sound of my own voice any more than I can handle the smug, ...

Finding information about businesses in your vicinity just got one step easier. Thanks to a new Google feature called "near me now," you don't even have to enter a location to search around your location on your mobile device. "Near me now" uses your phone's GPS – on Android or via Google's mobile website - to let you browse nearby locations. Near me now offers a list of common ...

For the last month or so, I've been keenly keeping an eye on the progress of the open source webOS application for Foursquare: the location-based mobile game that's been in the tech spotlight since its launch at SXSW last year. Whilst you can check in online using Foursquare's mobile website, the folks at Foursquare have been gradually rolling out more native applications after launching with ...

Released by AT&T themselves, Mark the Spot is an iPhone app that very simply lets you report outages in your mobile connectivity. Have a look at the screenshot -- what you see is what you get. An honest, earnest piece of troubleshooting software! Kudos must be given to AT&T for a truly humble app. Network admins have limited contact with the end-users during the best of times -- there's a ...

My primary phone is a BlackBerry, but I also own an iPhone with no service contract. Several weeks ago I had the lucky gig of compiling a few fart apps for TUAW, and I was less than impressed with the overall situation. In other words: most fart apps stink. But let's face it, fart apps made a lot of noise for the iPhone, in no small part because Apple initially refused to "pull the finger," ...

I have to confess that, until today, I was still converting latitude and longitude by Googling "convert GPS coordinates" and putting it into whatever came up first. That just changed when I found Tiny Geo-coder. It converts coordinate pairs to addresses, and vice versa. Not only that, but it has an API, so you can use it in other web projects that require coordinates. One of the first real-world ...

I'm pretty bad about remembering to pull out our video camera to record our family's adventures. I think the thought of a bunch of raw, unedited footage piling up just makes me anxious. Of course, something that feels like work can instantly be turned into fun if you throw in a bit of technology, particularly software, right? My first exposure to Seero was when my dad sent along a link to a ...

One of the two big differences in the new iPhone 3G is the included GPS technology. Restaurant locator/review site UrbanSpoon knows this very well, and they've taken advantage of the GPS with an iPhone native app for UrbanSpoon. Without even having to tell it, it knows where you are, it knows where restaurants are, and it's ready to get food into your mouth. It gets more fun than that, though: ...

If you're an avid runner, hiker or cyclist, you probably need some way to keep track of your routes and plan workouts that cover just the right distance. TrailRunner is an application that's up to the job. It keeps track of your point-to-point "tracks" using open-source maps, and lets you stitch them together into complete routes. It also works with a ForeRunner GPS, if you happen to have one, ...

Nokia Sports Tracker is an amazing application for Nokia N series smartphones that uses GPS to enable users to track their activities. Do you have a friend who has a Garmin ForeRunner? These are amazing GPS watches because they give you exact statistics about distance traveled, average speed, elevation gain, etc. Well Nokia Sports Tracker gives you the same information by using the GPS in your ...