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Dec 06

Google Maps for Mobile 5 unveiled, adds dynamic map drawing and offline mode

Why look at static images when you can get a more 3D view of the urban scene? Google’s Maps for Mobile 5 just got previewed on stage by Andy Rubin at D: Dive Into Mobile — with a prototype Motorola Honeycomb tablet, no less! The biggest visual change is dynamic map drawing: vectors instead of flat images that scale without render hiccups and will show the buildings fleshed out for over 100 cities — we gotta say, it looks great. Even more fun is that you can now use two fingers to tilt and rotate around the map (in addition to moving and pinch-to-zoom, of course). We’ve been told it’s a much snappier experience, and the storage for these vectors is much smaller than the current images, which brings us to… offline caching. Maps will keep on file the locations that you go to (and search) most often, and it’ll be able to reroute while offline in Navigation. You’ll still need a connection for altering the route altogether — sorry, subway-hoppers — but once you go, even if you stray, you’ll still be rerouted back on track.

Most modern Android phones from the original Droid onward should be able to enjoy most if not all the new features, depending on hardware capabilities (3D rendering) and “distinct multitouch” hardware support — the Nexus One, interestingly enough, supports vector maps but not the rotate functionality because it lacks the latter multitouch requirements. Google sent us a list of devices that support 100 percent of 5.0’s features, which you can find after the break. The update is due out in the “coming days,” according to Rubin. Great way to kick off Nexus S’ launch, then.

Gallery: Google Maps for Mobile 5.0

Continue reading Google Maps for Mobile 5 unveiled, adds dynamic map drawing and offline mode

Google Maps for Mobile 5 unveiled, adds dynamic map drawing and offline mode originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nov 30

Verizon sucks at Photoshop: confuses the Droid X for an iPhone

Posted in: app, Apple, droid, iPhone, maps, motorola, photoshop, Today's Chili, verizon

Man, Motorola’s not going to be pleased about this! The Droid X is justifiably one of Verizon’s marquee devices for this holiday season and takes pride of place on the carrier’s Cyber Monday offers page, but wait… why does its screen display the iPhone version of Google Maps? Oops!

[Thanks, Chris]

Verizon sucks at Photoshop: confuses the Droid X for an iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Nov 2010 07:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nov 03

Ripxx ski app for iPhone great for athletes, useless for Epyx Winter Games

Posted in: app, Apple, AppStore, gps, iPhone, Sports, Today's Chili, video

We received an interesting email from Ripxx this morning, stating that due to an unprecedented outpouring of comments on our previous post for its sports GPS, the company’s gone and developed its very own iPhone app. That’s right, instead of planning your ski trips around a piece of dedicated hardware, you can now do it on the same device you use to read Texts From Last Night while sitting on the loo. The Ripxx iPhone Ski App, as it’s called, features trail maps from over 200 North American ski resorts, Google Maps integration, the ability to track time, speed, distance, and vertical drop for your various trips down the mountain. Whatever that means. But hey — it’s only five bucks! And it’s available now. Video after the break.

Continue reading Ripxx ski app for iPhone great for athletes, useless for Epyx Winter Games

Ripxx ski app for iPhone great for athletes, useless for Epyx Winter Games originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | source App Store | Email this | Comments

Oct 06

The Best Navigation Apps [Appbattle]

Posted in: AndroidApps, apps, IphoneApps, navigation, Today's Chili, top

Click here to read The Best Navigation Apps

One moment it’s a phone in your hand. The next, it’s a full-fledged turn-by-turn nav unit with an active internet connection. What happened? These apps, is what. More »

Sep 20

Peek 9 is nine times faster than Pronto, adds PeekMaps, weather, Twitter, and Facebook

Posted in: Google, maps, Microsoft, Today's Chili, twitter

It’s official. The latest Peek — dubbed the Peek 9 — is up and dancing with a full list of features. The hubbub boils down to speed improvements thanks to revamped software that claims to reduce lag and sluggishness experienced when connecting to newly enhanced Peek servers. While the hardware appears unchanged, it’s still said to offer better reception and be 9 times faster (hence the name) than the Peek Pronto. The 9 comes pre-loaded with native Twitter and Facebook apps with ActiveSync support tossed in for Exchange. They’ve also added PeekMaps and weather apps to give you an idea of where you are in Google Maps and what the weather forecast is for that location. Rounding things out is the Streams RSS reader; the ability to view Word, PDF, and spreadsheet attachments; and a new Peektop Apps feature that lets you transform Peek into a “tailor-made mobile productivity machine,” whatever that means. Peak 9 is priced at $69.99 or $99.99 plus two months of contract-free service (sorry, no lifetime service offering at the moment). After that, the Peek service will cost you $19.95/mth or as little as $9.95/mth for 24 months. Of course, with the 9’s broader communications focus beyond just Twitter or eMail, we really have to wonder why anyone would buy this instead of a much smarter featurephone — a Nokia C3, for example, can be had in the US unlocked for just $129.

Gallery: Peek 9 is nine times faster than Pronto, adds PeekMaps, weather, Twitter, and Facebook

Peek 9 is nine times faster than Pronto, adds PeekMaps, weather, Twitter, and Facebook originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Sep 2010 05:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sep 09

Google Walking Navigation beta and Street View now available for Android

Posted in: Android, Google, GoogleAndroid, maps, navigation, Today's Chili, video

Man, we’re starting to think Google should just host an I/O event every month. As the search giant continues to roll out new innovations, today’s introduction involves none other than Android. Starting today, folks with Android phones using version 1.6 or greater have a pair of must-downloads to tackle: Walking Navigation (Beta) and Street View smart navigation. The former is bundled into Google Maps for Mobile 4.5, offering pedestrians a more robust routing option when using their own two feet to maneuver from place to place. It’s still in beta, obviously, but we’re definitely digging the “vibrate to turn” alert and the map’s ability to rotate with you as you turn the phone. Street View smart navigation is the same stuff you’re used to seeing on a bona fide desktop browser, but tailor made for operation on your smartphone. Finally, the new Google Maps search bar will make it even easier to find places you’re in need of finding, and if you need some visual stimulation while your downloads progress, hop on past the break and mash play.

Continue reading Google Walking Navigation beta and Street View now available for Android

Google Walking Navigation beta and Street View now available for Android originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | source Google Mobile Blog | Email this | Comments

Sep 02

Mobile Devices Need Custom Maps

Posted in: ipad, maps, Today's Chili

Interactive Map of Afghanistan for iPad. Image By/Used Courtesy Of Development Seed

GPS maps for smartphones generally require a fairly high-speed wireless internet connection, consume significant processor resources, and are optimized for driving. But what if your 3G connection is unreliable or unavailable, and you still need to get from point A to point B — perhaps on foot?

Last week, I spoke with Eric Gunderson and Ian Cairns at Development Seed, one of the companies developing tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations, like this one. It’s not that farfetched: In a natural disaster and in the developing world, mobile phones may be useful navigational aids, but only if they can work without a reliable data connection and are optimized for different kinds of transportation than just zooming down the highway to the nearest Starbucks.

Development Seed caught our attention with a post that Cairns wrote for PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab on custom maps for cyclists and drunken, late-night pedestrians. For StumbleSafely, DC Bikes, and DC Nightvision, a typical street map was overlaid with crime data, bike lanes, bar and bike shop locations, and municipal infrastructure: “Not just buildings and roads, but even crosswalks, medians, and topography lines.” In short, all of the data that actually helps you get where you’re going when you’re not in a car.

These maps were built with TileMill, an open-source program the company created to help governments, NGOs, news organizations, and others easily create custom maps. The idea is to make map image tiles and Geographic Information System (GIS) data as easy to work with as RSS feeds or CSV databases are today.

“We want to put these tools in the hands of the subject-matter experts and see what they can do,” Gunderson told Wired.com. Development Seed won a Knight News Challenge award for the project.

Knight News Challenge: Tilemapping from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

One of the most-needed and currently most-poorly-served markets for mapping and data visualization support is in international development. As Gadget Lab reported this week, mobile devices are thriving in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the developing world, but data bandwidth and easy-to-find electricity aren’t.

“You can’t get an application like Google Earth working in Afghanistan,” Gunderson said. Maps On A Stick offers full-fledged, data-and-image-rich maps on a USB drive for no-bandwidth or poor-bandwidth use. The company and clients have plenty of experience with those scenarios, mapping uncharted road data in Africa, or helping relief workers provide housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina.

I think about those disaster scenarios often, just as I think about the people I love walking home alone in the city late at night.

When Apple launched the iPhone, it made a big deal about how its software team had written its own Maps client, using Google’s data only for the backend. It had to work for the touch interface, but it also had to make sense for how people would be likely to use Maps on a mobile device.

Now that easy mobile maps have become a natural part of our smartphone-carrying, 3G-surfing lives, it may be time for us to broaden our assumptions about the kinds of maps we’ll need and the conditions we’ll have when we need them.

See Also:

Aug 17

Samsung Galaxy S GPS-gate: two problems, not one (and what to do about it)

Posted in: Android, att, GalaxyS, Google, gps, samsung, Sprint, t-mobile, Today's Chili

You may have noticed the update on our Epic 4G review from yesterday where we lauded the fact that Samsung seemed to have fixed the GPS problem plaguing every other Galaxy S flavor released thus far, but it turns out there are actually two distinct issues. One has a fix — sort of — while the other is hopefully what we’re going to get next month. Here are the two failure modes, based on what we know so far:

“Use wireless networks” is now turned off by default, but even with it on, the phone may be slow or unable to determine even a rough location. Originally, we’d believed this was the only problem. Samsung tells us that it’s a new Google mandate that Android devices be shipped with the “use wireless networks” option disabled, which means you’re relying on traditional GPS alone to determine your location — a lost cause indoors, in urban canyons, or under dense tree cover. Indeed, we discovered it was turned off on our Captivate, Vibrant, and Epic 4G after fresh hard resets, and there’s no indication to the user that it’s probably in their best interest to enable it; we’re accustomed to being presented with the option during account setup on other Android devices, but it doesn’t happen here. After enabling it from settings, we found that both the Captivate and Epic 4G were able to get our location with 1,000 to 1,500-meter accuracy practically immediately in Google Maps, though the Vibrant still never came through; it had the weakest signal of the three, which may have accounted for that (though it never dropped the signal altogether).
The regular GPS circuitry and software aren’t doing their job. Cell tower triangulation and WiFi location database services like Skyhook only take you so far — at the end of the day, you still need to tune in to the birds a few thousand miles up to figure out precisely where you are. All Galaxy S models seem to be having trouble turning GPS reception into coordinates, even when the phone is able to see four or more satellites in view (four is the minimum you normally need for a precise, three-dimensional lock). In some cases, resetting the phone apparently helps, but it ceases to work again after a day or two of use. To our knowledge, none of the homebrew fixes out there have been able to solve this part of the problem perfectly and permanently. The Captivate and Vibrant are both affected by this one; we’re not sure on the Epic, but we’re working to nail it down.

What this means for you: for now, simply make sure you have “Use wireless networks” checked in your Galaxy S’s settings under the “Location & security” menu. It won’t get you the most reliable, precise location you should be entitled to, but it’s a start — and next month’s round of firmware updates should hopefully take us the rest of the way.

[Thanks, Carl]

Samsung Galaxy S GPS-gate: two problems, not one (and what to do about it) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 11

Laser backpack creates instant 3D maps, Venkman reminds you to not cross the streams (video)

Posted in: Today's Chili, video

Laser backpack creates instant 3D maps, Venkman reminds you not to cross the streams (video)

Total protonic reversal? Small price to pay for an instantaneous 3D scan of a building’s interior. That’s what the backpack pictured above delivers, a project from UC Berkeley students and faculty Matthew Carlberg, Avideh Zakhor, John Kua, and George Chen. The pack contains a suite of laser scanners and positional sensors that enable it to capture images of building interiors as a fleshy assistant roams their halls. Those images can then be automatically pieced back together to create a 3D representation. We’re having visions of instant Doom II WADs but the real boon here could be an extension to Google Maps where you could not only get a Street View but also an interior view. You know, really scope out that little Thai joint before you schlep yourself all the way downtown.

Continue reading Laser backpack creates instant 3D maps, Venkman reminds you to not cross the streams (video)

Laser backpack creates instant 3D maps, Venkman reminds you to not cross the streams (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink KGO-TV San Francisco | source UC Berkeley | Email this | Comments

Aug 09

CyberNotes: Google Maps Firefox Extensions

Posted in: CyberNotes, Features, Firefox Extensions, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Google Maps is hands down my favorite online mapping service because it has a simplistic design, which in the end makes it load extremely fast. Not only that but they offer features not found on other mapping services, including Street View, Wikipedia integration, and even walking directions.

Naturally when there is a great web service people will start making Firefox extensions that take full advantage of it, and that’s exactly what’s happened with Google Maps. Below we’ve got our top 5 Firefox extensions that push Google Maps (and some other mapping services) to the limits.

–CyberSearch (Homepage)–

CyberSearch is the advanced Google Search extension that we’ve created, and one of the services it supports is Google Maps. What this gives you is full access to the Google Maps database right from the Firefox 3 address bar. When searching for a location it will also provide the address and phone number right there in the title, and clicking on a result will take you to the Google Maps page.

cybersearch local.png

–GDirections (Homepage)–

This extension is pretty simple because all it does is provide a context menu entry to pull up a highlighted address on Google Maps. Just select an address on the screen, right-click on it, go to GDirections and choose the map option. You can also go into the preferences and customize up to three default home/from addresses so that you can get quick directions.

Note: This extension also works with Yahoo! Maps.

–All Your Maps Are Belong To Us (Homepage)–

Not much to see here. This extension pretty much does everything in the background without you ever noticing. Anytime it recognizes a URL pointing to another mapping service (like Yahoo!) it will automatically reroute the links to point to Google Maps. There’s no list of what services it supports, but Yahoo is definitely one of them.

–Mini Map Sidebar (Homepage)–

Do all of your mapping right from the Firefox sidebar with the Mini Map extension. This has an incredible interface setup to navigate, search, and obtain directions all from the comfort of your Firefox sidebar. Plus mapping an address is as simple as dragging and dropping it into the dropzone located below the maps.

Note: This extension also works with Yahoo! Maps.

mini map.png

–Locator (Homepage)–

This is actually very similar to the Mini Map extension mentioned above, but instead of opening in the sidebar it opens in either a new tab or new window. I actually prefer to have the map open in a new tab so that I have a much larger viewing area available to me, and that’s the primary reason I’ve chosen to use this extension over Mini Map.

To get a map of an address all you have to do is highlight the address on the page, right-click, and then use the “Locate on Google Map” option to have it open a map for you.

–Overview–

As you can see there are a variety of different extensions available that put the full power of Google Maps right at your fingertips. Plus the fact that they make getting a map just a click away can save you a ton of time.

If you’ve got a favorite Google Maps extension be sure to let us know in the comments!

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Download Firefox Portable 2 RC2

Google Maps Gets Zoom Enhancements

Hasta La Gadget!