Tag Archives: iphone

EverTrail on the iPhone

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Another day another new iPhone application. Today it was EveryTrail.

In the past I used my Garmin Etrex as a GPS and a regular camera, by fiddling with LoadMyTracks, HoudahGeo and Flickr I managed to upload my walks to Everytrail. Today it all changed :-)

Here is my test walk around Cambridge with the iPhone:-

cambridge station walk

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

EverTrail iPhone screen

On the iPhone the application looks like this, very intuitive to use, give it your login name ad password then just walk and take pictures. It isn’t using the cell networks or WiFi so these can be switched off. I didn’t and the iPhone battery was dead in about 2 hours :-(

Battery life is a real issue with all these new applications, it means its a playphone rather than a real tool for saying doing day long hikes.

Other than that its a great little application – the log was uploaded over WiFi in a few minutes at home.

It could be improved by having the screen shut off and some positive indication that it is locked to the satellites, maybe buzz if it loses the GPS signal. A screen showing satellite positions and strengths would be cool too. I also noticed that it lost the Altitude data when transferring to Everytrail – not so bad in Cambridge but annoying on a mountain walk.

Apologies for poor image quality – obviously a sticky finger left some traces on the camera lens – a snag when you have to hold the phone for so long!

A good free application that is really only limited by the poor iPhone batteries and satellite receptio.

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iPhone simple If found screen

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iPhone front screen

I created myself a simple & neat ‘if found’ or ICE (In case of emergency) front screen on the iphone.

I used a regular photo which I over printed with my details using Skitch. I then uploaded it to the iphone by creating an album for the image which I synchronized . Once on the iPhone selecting the Use as Wallpaper option (the little arrow in the left corner when you click on the image), converts the image for the front screen. Seems to work quite well :-)

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Twitter beaching the whale

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Very bad news from Twitter,. Twitters USP here in the UK was the ability to send & receive tweets by SMS (Text messaging) as of today, with no warning whatsoever, they have cut of receiving updates here in the UK by text.

Their so called UK number, actually its a number based in the Isle of Man, was outside most UK users calling plans (O2 it was included in the free texts) so most folks would not update their twitters at 20p or so at a time. However, incoming texts in the UK are free so Twitter was a neat way of sending texts to mobile phones from a PC. and also a way of amplifying texts 1 text to many. Alas no more.

The reasons given are cost they argue “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year” Which doesn’t add up to me as Bulk SMS’s seem to cost between 2p and 1.3p according to Bulksms.org

Its interesting that they did not even offer an option to pay for receiving texts or even severely limit the number of texts per user? We are not all Scobles with thousands of followers.

Their alternative idea of using the internet on your phone is not so hot either, although Twinkle and twitterific work OK on the iPhone they cannot run in the background or alert you in the same way that texting does.

I think they have now left the market wide open for Google to come in with Jaiku, although the omens don’t look good on that front.

I guess the good news is that the twitter service may now be more reliable as users flood away leaving the fail whale beached rather than suspended.

Update:

First people trying to bridge the gap with tweetsms

Meanwhile over on AVC, Fred Wilson an investor in Twitter, wrote in reply to my comment:-

Pity that Twitter has just hammered us in the UK. Just as i was getting my social circle to start using it via text on their phones :-(
Also very poor customer service just chopping of SMS with no warning at all. Perhaps they hadn’t paid their texting phone bill!

It will be back. The costs of supplying effectively free texting in the UK just got too high. People were abusing it with DMs

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MegaPhone & iPhone

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MegaPhone screenshot

MegaPhone from Ecamm networks is a very neat little application for the Mac and iPhone. You can now store and read all yout sms texts on the MAC as well as storing all your call data. A big plus for us ex Treo users is that at last you can store, create  and add memo’s (notes) on the iPhone. Another useful facility is that you can use the iPhone as a memory stick. (As long as you have megaphone on all your computers).

On the screenshot you can see that I have kept 544 text messages since I got the phone on the 10th Nov 2007.

A very handy bit of software for a tenner.

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