Google Maps Navigation currently provides over 12 billion miles of GPS-guided driving and walking directions per year. Now, GPS turn-by-turn (or in this case, stop-by-stop) navigation is available for public transit directions in 400 cities around the globe with Transit Navigation.
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6 July 2011
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2 July 2011
It seems like smartphones would be useful for yellow cabs as well; I don’t really see a reason for the TLC to ban them. Hopefully they’ll get over their bureaucratic inertia.
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11 May 2011
DOJ wants wireless providers to store user info
Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division, picked an odd place to describe the department’s proposal: a U.S. Senate hearing that arose out of revelations about iPhones recording information about owners’ locations, and, in some cases, transmitting those data to Apple without consent.
Cognitive dissonance on civil liberties is baked into this administration.
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26 January 2011
On Friday evening at Livingston and Court, a 26-year-old woman was approached by a man who asked to borrow her cell. When she seemed reluctant, he offered her $20 to hold while he made the call. This seemed to win her over, as she handed him her Blackberry Curve. He then took off with it.
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12 December 2010
Find the nearest NYC bike rack on Androids, iPhones
Looking through the eligible datasets at the NYC BigApps devcamp on Saturday, I re-discovered the DOT’s bicycle parking locations.
The data is distributed in a KML file, which is convenient since Google Maps is able to load these without any programming. In fact, the page where the file is made available has a map on it with the dataset loaded.
The only hitch is that this KML file is 1.7 MB. It has the coordinates of every bicycle rack in the city, after all. So the page itself takes a while to load on a computer, and it would be impractical to load it (or any variant) on a phone.
So my big idea was to make a very basic web site that would serve a Google Map with just the points in the user’s vicinity loaded. You can do this easily in mobile browsers now, thanks to the Geolocation API. You would bookmark the site in your phone’s main screen, then pull it up whenever you can’t find a rack.
Then I remembered that there’s a number of apps for phones that serve location information in “channels” that users can subscribe to. Might one of these let me upload a KML that it could then serve more efficiently in a channel? YES. Wikitude is a very flexible and friendly service that I’ve worked with in the past so I wasn’t surprised that they made it easy to upload the file and tag it.
On the phone, it works great. I’ve only tested it on Android but Wikitude has an iPhone version as well and I expect it’s very similar.
How to get the NYC bike racks on your phone
- Install Wikitude using your phone’s app store / market / whatever
- Open the app
- Select “Nearby” to find channels with local information
- “New York City Bicycle Racks” should not be too far down the list
- Select it, then select the “Map” view
- The map shows your approximate location, with bicycle racks!
So that’s pretty good. Whenever you reopen Wikitude that channel is already enabled so you can go right to the map view. I think I’m set for the next time I arrive somewhere and suddenly realize I have no idea where the nearest bicycle parking is.
I might still make the mobile site I was thinking of, as it would be fun to have an entry for BigApps that fulfills a need. As a site it wouldn’t require any install or any instructions beyond a link (and could be encoded in a QR code). Plus there are other nifty things I could build in to a site for the same audience.
But great artists ship, as some dude said, so I hope people will install Wikitude and start making good use of the data right away.
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20 October 2010
And here’s a word of advice—those of you with iPhones on the subway, especially the F train, just leave them in your bag.
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9 September 2010
Walking "Navigation" for Google Maps on Android
Their Navigation feature, conceived for automobiles, is actually pretty generally awesome. Next will certainly be the incorporation of Google’s bicycle directions.
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2 April 2010
I’m completely uninterested in buying an iPad — it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM ‘revolution’ in which ‘content’ people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.
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10 March 2010
My ride to work with the new Google Maps for bicycles. This thing is going to do as much to promote urban cycling as the green lanes themselves.
