Hi,
I've had trouble getting the iPhone Maps app to work as I would want it to. I read the chapter on iPhone Maps in the documentation (chapter 13) about five times and still cannot figure out how to get it to tell me my current location as a street name or something useful but, instead, I always seem to hear it in degrees, minutes, seconds which would be great if I was in a sailboat somewhere off in the ocean but, in Cambridge, it's fairly useless. Also, I cannot seem to figure out how to announce my turns while walking and the documentation is ambiguous on this matter. The biggest technology hurdle involved in turn by turn announcementsis that pedestrians rarely walk fast enough (most GPS systems require 5 mph as their minimum speed) to provide the system with a little bit of sloppiness. The iPhone has a compass and some other nifty little items that it can use to calculate a more accurate "current" position and should work reasonably well even if you are standing still. Of course, because it uses a combination of GPS, mobile phone towers, WiFi routers (if you have WiFi turned on) and a few other tricks, it is always best to be outdoors when you ask for your current location as all sorts of weirdness can happen when you add in the echo effects caused by being indoors. The second major technical hurdle, that even Sendero can't get exactly right, is defining the meaning of an intersection. Almost all GPS systems that are designed for an automobile uses the point at the center of the rectangle created by the intersection of the two streets. If these are relatively wide streets, that center point may be as much as 20 or more meters from the corner on which you are standing and a GPS system may say that you are that twenty metrs away from its idea of the intersection's location. A pedestrian sees an intersection as four separate corners while much locative software and databases only see that center point and, as a result, provide directions that one may find misleading. Knowing this, of course, will help you a lot as, assuming you have reasonably good orientation skills, you will figure out where the corners are and, at that point, use the directional software as a hint more than a precise indicator of where you are and what you should do. None of the above mentioned flaws are Apple's fault. They all exist in the state of the art GPS solutions available for hundreds of dollars. I personally think the Sendero group who licenses their engine to a bunch of different AT vendors does a great job as a pedestrian oriented system but, as above, they make their share of mistakes when precision is important. I think I heard in one of Shane Jackson's podcasts that one can use an external GPS receiver with the iPhone. If so, I highly recommend the Holux 1200 which fits on your key chain and does the best I've ever seen and only costs about $50. I don't know the iPhone Maps program on a detailed technical level but, if like most GPS programs, it uses the "confidence level" reported by the GPS receiver, the Holux device will be an incredible asset to those who rely on GPS for orientation purposes. Also, this is not a slam on Apple, virtually all of the GPS receivers built into mobile phones provide far less than optimal precision. On the good side of the app, you can put it into pedestrian mode, type in your source and destination or use your current position as the source location and it will generate a set of instructions for you. On the map page (by default it's a visual representation - maybe, in some future version, Apple can change the default to text if VO is detected as running) you will find a button near the bottom that says "list" which will turn the map into a list of textual information that you can use to plan your walk. When you go into pedestrian mode, the app tells you that it is still a beta and that one should use great caution (or something similar) and, in my use, I've found that it, in walking mode, still considers the direction of one way streets and doesn't provide optimal walking directions as people on foot don't care about which way the automotive traffic runs. I haven't really pounded on the app so I haven't tried rotaries or really complex six way intersections which the Boston area made famous. So, I expect it will get better in the future as virtually all of the Apple things seem to do but past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance (just ask a friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers). Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time evaluating various GPS solutions. If you go to my blog (http://www.blindconfidential.blogspot.com ) and search on "GPS" within the blog, you will find a number of articles about all sorts of things, mostly for Windows Mobile or Symbian handsets. Enjoy, cdh On Aug 5, 2009, at 5:13 PM, Christian wrote: > > Hi all, > Since the Iphone has a GPS and I have heared that the maps are > accessible, is this correct? > If so, how much info can you get? > Will you be able to find out where you are and so? > Many thanks, > Christian > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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