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MapQuest 4 Mobile Makes It Easy for You to Find Your Way

Michael Alexander — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:05 +0000

MapQuest 4 Mobile – I’ve always been a fan and user of MapQuest but I don’t think AOL’s MapQuest 4 Mobile offers any more functionality than many other apps that use maps to help you find nearby eateries, hotels, discounts and so on.

That’s not to say MapQuest 4 Mobile isn’t a competitive offering, because it is, especially given that it’s free. There’s much to like about this app. It’s user interface is quite good and if you’re in search of restaurants, hotels, shopping malls, gas stations, coffee shops and post offices, a single icon tap will take you there.

Start by setting your location and then either run a search by business name or address or tap the corresponding icon to find what you’re looking for. From there, grab directions on how to get from point A to point B and if it’s a place you plan to revisit, you can save your search or review your search history and save them as “My Places” and access them from anywhere online.

To save your My Places requires setting up an account using MapQuest, AIM or AOL. Create a screen name and the next time you want to see your saved places, log in.

MapQuest 4 Mobile is essentially the pocket version of the Web site. You can elect to find the shortest route, shortest time, avoid highways and so on. You can also view directions stop-by-stop and maps in landscape mode, which is also a good feature.

With devs ramping up for all the new map-related, GPS and compass capabilities of OS 3.0, I expect to see AOL bring some more clever features in updates to this app. Right now, it’s just a map app with a few extra bells and whistles and huge brand recognition and familiarity to most users. It could be a lot more.

When I tried to set up my My Places account, it took me three tries before the page would finally load. The app crashed right after each attempt, but I don’t know what to make of that. I wasn’t able to replicate it later. Perhaps you’ll have better luck and not have to worry about crashes at all.

MapQuest 4 Mobile is free, so if you try it and don’t like it, there’s no harm, no foul, right?

Where MapQuest 4 Mobile will have a difficult time is convincing iPhoners and iPod touchers to use it instead of Google, AAA Discounts and many other apps with maps designed to make it easy for you to find nearby retail outlets, businesses and restaurants.

rating: 8/10
app_name: MapQuest 4 Mobile

Pollution App Provides Geographic Environemntal Information

Jennifer Beam — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:30:13 +0000

Pollution – Let’s be honest, environmental information apps are probably not at the forefront of many iPhone/iPod touch users’ minds, but maybe they should be. I confess, I never thought about searching for an app that provided location-based air, water, and ground pollutant information, but Pollution by aMobile Future does exactly that. Granted, it may not be 100% accurate and up-to-date, but it does provide the information based on reputable cited sources, like the EPA here in the states. And it is completely geographic, based on the user’s current location.

I am not as eco-minded as many. I recycle with a fair amount of enthusiasm and am trying to develop a habit of utilizing re-usable shopping bags for grocery trips, but these are just small steps. However, I do believe that awareness and information is vital to environmental progress. With the Pollution app, you can definitely garner a bit of information about your environment. What you do with and think about that information is up to you.

Pollution supplies users with specific pollutants within a specified radius of their current location. Granted, it only supplies information based on emissions from businesses and industries, not cars or homes, but I was surprised to view the industrious facilities in my vicinity that I didn’t even know existed. Of course some of the facilities I did know about, many not surprising me with their reported air and/or water pollutant output, but a few surprised me in general. Pollution gives you a map or satellite view of the offending facilities so you can determine exactly where the unfamiliar ones are located.

I admit that I have no idea what many of the pollutants reportedly emitted from some of the facilities are, but Pollution gives you an overview of four different types of pollutants — air, water, ground, and radio wave. Plus, for many of the pollutants, a detailed overview including description, uses, major emissions, and impacts on human health and the environment in general are provided. Some pollutants are lacking this detailed description, but it would appear there are plans to expand for their inclusion.

Currently, Pollution covers several European countries, the UK, and the US. The navigation is pretty straightforward. Pollution pinpoints your current location, allows you to specify the area you’d like to cover in terms of kilometers, and then provides both a summary of total numbers of each type of pollutant present, as well as the detailed listings previously explained. Anyone who has an interest in learning more information about their environment will appreciate the ease with which Pollution provides it.

app_name: Pollution
rating: 8/10

MeetWays Locates the Midpoint Between A and B

Michael Alexander — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:00:38 +0000

MeetWays—There’s a lake in central Massachusetts, not too far from where I live, called Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, which is said to be one of the world’s longest place names.

The locals say it means, “You fish on your side, and I fish on my side, and no one fishes in the middle.” However, according to an entry in WikiPedia, the 45-letter name comes from the language of the local Nipmuc people and means something close to “fishing place at the boundary.”

In a ‘roundabout way, that’s what came to mind when I decided to review MeetWays, an app from a developer of the same name. Yeah, my mind does tend to wander, which partially explains why MeetWays intrigued me.

The sole purpose of MeetWays is for two people to determine what is the midpoint between two places so they can meet up for a date, to buy or sell something they saw on Craigslist, or to make sure they’re not fishing in the middle of a lake with a name no one has any hopes of pronouncing.

Simply enter the two points in the designated fields, as well as a point of interest if you’re so inclined, and MeetWays will split the entire distance and pin it on a map at the halfway point along with driving directions. It’s up to you if you want to avoid highways to get to your destination. All that takes is a tap on the Avoid Highways on/off switch.

MeetWays works best with an iPhone 3G with GPS built-because of its precision, but GPS is not a must for this app to hook you up. You can save and manage your pins if you plan to make the trip more than once.

Last, you also have the option of emailing a link to whomever you’re meeting. Tap the link in the email and you’ll go to the MeetWays site where you’ll find a map with the suggested route and an address where to meet.

MeetWays, the developer, says the app works in 27 countries.

Just how useful an app like this is, I really can’t say. On a personal level, I can think of maybe two or three instances where I’ve met someone halfway in more than 10 years. Regardless, it’s straightforward to use and the interface makes it easy to get to wherever you want to go.

I tried MeetWays for find the midpoint in a variety of locations and it seemed to work fine in every instance including locating the midpoint of one of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg’s boundaries.

app_name: MeetWays
rating: 7/10

TopVideo Sounds Good, but Misses The Point

Casandra Armour — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:00:27 +0000

TopVideo by Akinwale Ariwodola is a an application that aims to provide the user with the most popular videos from sites like YouTube and more.

However, TopVideo doesn’t truly provide videos, plural. It offers one video in each of five categories: New, This Hour, Today, This Week, This Month. I certainly expected to be offered even the top five or ten for each one of those categories. In particular since, on a day like today, the most popular video for New, This Hour and Today were all the same.

Once the user selects the category they’d like to view, tapping load brings up the current most popular, its location and number of hits. However, tapping all over my iPod screen mercilessly without any response drew me to the surprising conclusion that while TopVideo says what the video is and shows a screen shot, it does not play the video nor connect to the site that hosts it.

TopVideo is as efficient and technologically advanced as receiving a fax announcing which online videos are popular. As a free app TopVideo would still be less than worthwhile, but to pay $1.99 sinks TopVideo furthur to the bottom.

app_name: TopVideo
rating: 2/10

IPark Gets You Back to Where You Started

Issen Alibris — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:30:48 +0000

Are you one of the chronically lost, wandering the asphalt jungle in search of your car? There’s an app for that. IPark is a parking utility app that helps you keep track of your vehicle. It will get you there from any location as long as you’ve marked your car. Just follow the IPark compass back to your car.

Start up IPark and mark your vehicle. Marking your vehicle saves the location coordinates right into your phone. You can add notes about your vehicle location in the white bar above these coordinates. Remember you can only mark your vehicle when the border is yellow or green. This means there is a strong GPS fix on your location. After you’ve marked your vehicle and left any relevant notes you’re off to handle your business.

Finding your way back is even easier. IPark uses a GPS-powered compass to get you back to your car. The closer you get you’ll notice the compass will slowly become green and the distance in feet on the display will also decrease. You can even change the preferences so that your phone will vibrate when you are close. When you’re within a specified range, if you’ve snapped a picture of your vehicle and saved it, it will pop up on the screen.

IPark is loaded with extras. If you need a tow or to tell someone where your car is located you can email your location along with a link to Google Maps. You can also enter data on the parking structure such as what floor you were on, space number and set a timer to record how long you’ve been parked. IPark stores all of your previously saved locations by keeping a running history of your entries. It’s handy enough to let you choose between standard or metric units and you can even save your AAA number in the app if you’re a member.

IPark has most of its bases covered, although there are few issues. If you do not have access to clear skies or a strong signal it can’t use the GPS in your phone to navigate you to the car. Between the color coding and compass bar, there are a lot of graphic elements vying for attention. And, unfortunately, IParkfroze a couple of times and lost my information.

IPark seems like a good application. It’s well thought and fairly easy to use. However, I am not quite sure it’s a simple as it could be. After all, you could simply park near a landmark and snap a picture to remind you before walking away from your car.

rating: 6/10
app_name: IPark

California Traffic Report Helps Out Commuters

Issen Alibris — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:00:57 +0000

Since the weather is more predictable than the traffic here in California, you’re bound to check the traffic report before you start your day or travel home from work each night. There is no way to avoid it there’s going to be traffic on your commute. California Traffic Report will provide you with up to date information on your route from The California Department of Transportation.

Here’s how it works. Open the California Traffic Report application and it will ask you to choose San Diego, LA or the San Francisco Bay area. First you’ll have to enter your routes into the My Traffic button. You’ll be taken to the web version of the app. Next, enter your routes — one for the morning and another for evening. Remember, if you have multiple segments you’ll need to enter those as well. Forgetting one can give you an extremely false sense of roadway reality.

Tap the My Traffic button at the bottom of the screen again after you’ve entered this information and you’ll get a screen populated with your commute time and the distance from entrance to exit. You’ll also get detailed traffic information that lists each exit and the speed of the traffic at those exits. In case you were thinking about taking an alternate route that you haven’t entered, there is also a Speed button that you can hit at anytime. This gives you average highway speed information broken down by freeway and exit. If you’d like to be reminded of just how generally horrible or extremely lucky you might be on the freeways you can also hit the traffic map button. Instantly view the traffic in Los Angeles, The Inland Empire and Orange County.

California Traffic Report has a nice visual interface that’s easy to read even with the abundance of information on the screen at any given moment. There is a desktop version that it syncs to and that you must sign up with in order to keep your commute data up to date. I felt like the highway times were a little on the light side. But, it does give a disclaimer about travel time. Since it doesn’t consider side streets, your actual commute time is different than your highway travel time.

California Traffic Report, which is currently free in the App Store, works best when it has access to Wi-Fi in my opinion; it dragged using the 3G and Edge networks.

rating: 6/10
app_name: California Traffic Report

Unidentified Bogies Appear on Earthcomber’s Personal Radar

Michael Alexander — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:00:12 +0000

Earthcomber, the developer of Earthcomber the app, aims to provide iPhone users with a “personal radar,” which they can use to find their favorite things nearby — people and places, mainly.

Earthcomber is location aware, so you usually won’t need to go far to find whatever you’re looking for. As you would expect, the app works best with the GPS built into the iPhone 3G and over Wi-Fi. You have the option of entering your zip code into Earthcomber to fix your location, so no worries.

Earthcomber is capable of searching for a wide variety of public places in your immediate locale, ranging from ATMs, to restaurants, to free Wi-Fi, to live music, and it seems, everything else that you might want. First, tap the “Explore” icon. Next, tap restaurants, for example, and up comes a list of eateries within about 10 miles of your location. Tap the name of the restaurant, and you’ll get an address, telephone number, directions and a map.

Earthcomber has a number of other features, all of which require registering with Earthcomber’s Web site to access them. Two key features worth noting are, one, the ability to create “My Radar,” a personalized list of your favorite people and places and, two, share your location and status with other people (you can show your visibility to everyone in your favorites or limit it to a select few).

The interface is a bit clunky and old-fashioned in look and feel. At times, Earthcomber was just plain quirky. The lists of nearby locations changed quit a bit even though I changed my location by only 1 mile.

In another instance, Earthcomber displayed a list with the same item repeated seven times. In yet another instance, I found misspellings in the names of some sites (Cardnial Spelling Philatelc Museum).

When I looked for places near me that offered free Wi-Fi, one place, the Simple Cafe was near the bottom of the list. The problem is the Simple Cafe is 165 miles from me, in Brooklyn, according to Earthcomber. That’s hardly nearby and besides, Brooklyn, is a bit more than 200 miles from me (I know this because I often travel to NYC, including Brooklyn).

Earthcomber is hardly compelling. The idea is fine; but the implementation is goofy.

app_name: Earthcomber
rating: 5/10

Google Maps Update Makes a Traveler’s Delight

Derek Walter — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:00:14 +0000

Google Maps was already one of the strongest built-in apps on the iPhone. But with the 2.2 software update the addition of Street View and the ability to get public transit information make this almost a necessity for traveling or getting around a major city.

So there was only one way to give it the ultimate test: New York City.

Perhaps the first strength I noticed was Google Maps’ excellent ability to function as a crime prevention tool. Prior to my trip to New York I stayed a couple of days over Thanksgiving in Philadelphia. Enter Street View. I scored a nice deal on a rental car through Priceline. Unfortunately, Street View was able to show me why. The rental car office was in a, shall we say, area of town that wasn’t feeling the recession because it has been in one for three decades. Things turned out fine, of course, but it was handy to get a shot of the projects and burnt-out buildings that would be greeting me upon my arrival.

I really put the new Google Maps features to the test while in New York. First of all there was the matter of finding a train schedule from Princeton, NJ to New York City. Activating the GPS and using it to spot some train schedules ran pretty smoothly. When looking up driving directions, you tap a train icon to pull up transit information.

Performance was a bit spottier in Manhattan. Sometimes GPS took a while to find my location on the map. This of course delayed bringing up the transit schedules as it tried to find out where I was. The same lag was apparent when using Street View. It does not move as quickly as the full web-based version can over broadband (of course we do need to be reminded sometimes the iPhone is a mobile device).

Another addition was walking distance. This was pretty useful, given that it made planning much easier by being able to estimate how far it would be to walk somewhere. Much easier than trying to guess, especially if in a city you have not been to before.

The features are not perfect, but a welcome addition. Keep a power charger handy as the GPS combined with Google Maps features will probably keep you hooked.

app_name: Google Maps
rating: 9/10

Compass Free is Probably Lost on Most People

Michael Alexander — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:00:27 +0000

There’s not much you can say about Masayuki Akamatsu’s Compass Free because it just doesn’t do much. Actually, it doesn’t do anything. Launch the app and you get an image of a compass with a shaded area that runs from the edge of the screen to the center of the compass. The shaded area’s position relative to the compass center depends on the time of day.

The idea is that you lay the compass on the ground, put your finger in the middle of the compass and then pivot the iPhone until your finger lines up with the shaded area. When you do that, the N on the compass indicates north. I think a stick in the ground would work just as well.Or maybe you could find north by looking at what side of the trees moss grows on like they teach Boy Scouts.

app_name: Compass Free
rating: 2/10

CoffeeBreak Finds Caffeine for Less Than the Cost of a Cuppa Joe

Issen Alibris — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:10 +0000

If you’ve ever considered running out into the street screaming because you can’t find a decent cuppa joe, you may be in for a treat. CoffeeBreak is a lifestyle application that helps you stay completely caffeinated by using the GPS or WiFi of your phone to locate your favorite java joint and tell you which ones are nearby.

CoffeeBreak comes “pre-loaded” with eight fairly recognizable brand name coffee houses. With one tap, CoffeeBreak can tell you how close you are to the nearest Dunns Bros, Peets Coffee, Seattle’s Best, Coffee Bean, Coffee Beanery, Starbucks, and Tully’s. CoffeeBreak has 8 mugs — one for each coffeehouse — on a shelf along with a “post it” that represents “other coffee places”

To locate your favorite, just tap on the mug. It will slide back on the shelf. Next, you’re presented with a list of coffee houses from yards to miles away. Not only do you get the name, address and proximity but CoffeeBreak can route you from your current starting point. If you’re a map user it displays the location of the coffeehouse on a map and you can even email it to a friend. If you need to chat with someone at the coffee house there’s one-touch dialing from this screen. You can even save it to your contacts. CoffeeBreak provides you with very detailed information. CoffeeBreak is fast and will definitely be useful to the avid coffee drinker.

CoffeeBreak is a graphic gem. The coffee mugs that represent the coffee houses are intricately done with careful attention to details. The colors are vivid and rich. CoffeeBreak even makes a life-like sound when you tap the mug.

Some might be disappointed with the fact that it isn’t fully customizable. You’re stuck with the eight presets. There’s also no way of telling from the main screen whether or not one of those coffee houses even exists in your city. Perhaps a feature that darkens those that aren’t local?

Furthermore, CoffeeBreak doesn’t currently have a “show all”function. A feature like this would definitely please anyone just wanting a cup of coffee from the nearest coffee place. The map function works well. Although, it would be more helpful if you could see all the coffee houses in your area on the map.

With all of its functionality CoffeeBreak it’s definitely worth paying for. It’s currently 99 cents. Coffeebreak does the job and doesn’t break the bank.

rating: 8/10
app_name: CoffeeBreak