iPhone Stuff

I mentioned in the introductory post that Ingrid asked me to figure out if I could somehow get my iPhone to update status and locations during the hike.  I've spent some time playing with it, and believe I have a nice little mix of apps that will do quite nicely, and I plan on testing the functionality this weekend on the hike on the Pinchot Trail in Lackawanna State Park.  If things work out as I hope, I'll be able to update the blog in real time, with pictures, geo-locational information and quick status updates while the hike is in progress.

If you're not an iPhone user or otherwise just don't care, go ahead and skip the rest of this post, because I'm going to geek out some =)

After some research, I've found two apps that between them will cover my needs.  These are BlogPress, which is the nicer of the two, and BlogWriter, which isn't as nice but can do the geo-locational stuff.  Both are capable of using the iPhone's camera to take/integrate pictures and send them along with post updates to the blog, and both work very well with Blogger.

BlogPress has a much nicer interface.  It (happily) is able to go landscape mode for posting, auto-saves drafts, allows multiple pictures to be uploaded in a single post, and allows you to put the pictures wherever you want them in the post.  There are also many other nice features that users rave about, but I'm not an experienced enough blogger as of yet to know whether those features would be useful to me.  The one thing it doesn't have (and I've begged the developers to add it in an update) is the geo-locational capability.  I want to be able to have Ingrid and my daughters follow along while I'm out on hikes and "experience" it with me.

BlogWriter is very simplistic, with limited functionality and not so many bells and whistles.  It gets trashed in the AppStore reviews heavily...however, it has the one piece that lets me use this blog for the geo-locational stuff instead of also having to use twitter or something else in addition to the blog.  (As a side note, most of the twitter apps do have the ability to add geo-loc tags into tweets, and that was what I was looking at doing before I found BlogWriter).  With BlogWriter, you can seemingly only use the geo-loc when you're uploading a picture, so I guess that anytime I want to update location the blog will get a picture along with it.

When the geo-loc picture gets posted up to the blog, it provides a nice little link right below the picture.  If you click on the link, it launches Google-maps and drops a pin on the location that it was posted from.  Pretty cool stuff.

So, starting this weekend, readers of the blog get to be treated with updates from the trail.

Some other apps that I have found very useful in training thus far are RunKeeper Pro, which I love, The Weather Channel, GPS Kit and Google Earth.  RunKeeper Pro is great for mapping out distances traveled, pace, time elapsed and even allows you to upload your locational data throughout the hike or run into Google-maps so that you have a history of your workouts over time and can see exactly where you've been, how long it took you and overall progression of your workouts.  Unfortunately, keeping the iPhone unlocked and constantly updating GPS uses alot of battery and in a few hours the iPhone is dead (without backup battery)...so it's less useful for long hikes.  Having the Weather Channel is very nice on the longer hikes to keep track of rain/thunderstorms.  Not that there's a whole lot you can really do about it, but when you hear thunder in the distance you can at least pull up the live animated radar image and see if you're about to get wet or not.  GPS Kit and Google Earth I think are obvious, and cool. 

Let's just hope that I can get service on my iPhone out in the deserts of New Mexico.

Are any readers aware of other apps that would be handy to have along out on the trail and would be kind enough to share?