EveryTrail

This weekend was the 4th July holiday. In Boston the river was closed to sailors as motorboats streamed in to view the fireworks. I decided to use the opportunity for an extended ride out of the city into Central Mass farmland.

A couple of weeks ago I tried using TrailBehind to find local hiking suggestions. Basically this app pulls in content from a variety of websites and presents it in a mobile format. However, I found the content on the websites themselves to be far better and the search features of this app to rather insufficient. Sorry!

So, this time I decided to try EveryTrail, which appeared to be one of the main sources used by TrialBehind. The EveryTrail mobile app allows you to search for nearby routes or track your own. A search of roadbiking within 10 miles produced 259 results - probably better search results than the website itself produced! The tracking features of the app gave somewhat more mixed results.....

The idea is simple.... turn on the route tracking function, cycle along, take pictures where relevant, record notes etc and bingo you have a wonderful record of your adventures! It got off to a bad start when the app kept crashing if I tried to take a photo while tracking. Humph. I checked the app store for upgrades and found a new version which solved that problem. So, off I set into the wilds of Central Mass, past Thoreau's birthplace, Concord and towards the other Harvard. Somewhere near the other Harvard I paused tracking to look up some facts about a nearby Shaker settlement. When I checked back into the app I could not find my previously recorded track. Deaaaaam!

Well, that turned out to be my own stupid fault and soon we were back in business recording another track. It was all going fairly well then until my iPhone battery died (it managed about 5 hours of tracking) somewhere near Wachusetts Mountain.

Back at the ranch I was able to piece all the bits together and to painfully recreate some sections. My route is now uploaded with the 259 others entitled "IceCream and Jelly Sticks - a Ride through Central Massachusetts".

In summary, here's what I liked and displiked about the app

The good bits
- Access to a vast store of tracks and routes
- Ability to upload to your profile and turn the route into an official "guide"
- Photo tagging
- A good balance of features and simplicity

The bad bits
- Drained battery pretty quickly (although you can change GPS settings)
- Less information on speed, relief, calories etc than fitness tracking apps
- Need to pause tracking and resume when you leave/re-enter the app
- Search functions for different routes could be more advanced - distance, difficulty, start point etc (it's always surprising how many different things people are looking for)

TrailBehind

My second blog entry is going to start in a similar manner to the first. It's saturday night and I'm out with some friends. Last minute plans are hastily hatched... this time it's for a sunday hike. The hire car has been arranged... but where should we head to? In the UK it's not a problem to figure out.... because our wonderful OS maps make it possible to stitch together a route out of your back garden. But here in the US, you need to find a "trail" !?

Searching on the iPhone was slow and painful, so we ended up exchanging some midnight emails and resorting to the AMC Day Hikes in New England book. The upshot was a trip to World's End, a tame but beautiful reservation in Quincy, reminiscent of an English country park. How ironic. Personally I'd been hoping for something a bit more wild and challenging ;-)

What was missing? An iPhone app to help you find the perfect trail! The search begins.

So far I've downloaded "TrailBehind" launched in July 2009 with 109 ratings (approx 5,000 downloads) for $0.99.

TrailBehind is what you'd call a "Vertical Search" engine, or maybe a trail review "aggregator"? Basically, it's a search engine focused on hiking, biking and climbing trails. The interface can be customised to your preferred activity and results show a list of nearby activites.

Click on the heading and you get linked to a web page with the full review. Content is drawn from about 5 sources: EveryTrail, Local Hikes, Wikipedia, WayMarking.com, TrimbleOutdoors.com, SummitPost.

The app is certainly a convenient way to browse reviews from different sources. However it falls down in several respects.

1) Content pages are not optimized for mobile

After clicking each link you are taken through to websites which aren't designed for viewing on a mobile device. Here it gets difficult to click the links and retrieve information

2) Basic categorization

Even if I had this app on saturday night, I don't think it would have helped us to confidently resolve our quandry. Apart from categorizing trails as "hiking, biking or climbing" and giving an approximate distance, there is no way of sorting. I would have liked a difficulty rating, user feedback, distance from my location, type of terrain etc

3) Limited content

For an app 1 year old I would have expected more quality content. Since I live in Boston I want lots of detailed suggestions about local areas around Boston. When I travel then I'll be looking for more touristy content. At the moment there's barely enough content here to make me revisit the app more than once. Perhaps that says something about the quality of content on all the combined trail review websites out there! And without any user generated content on the app, I wouldn't expect this state to improve much.

Test Badge

The Weather Channel, WindGuru & Wind Alert

It's Friday night, 10pm and I'm invited to sail at the Corinthian Yacht Club in Marblehead MA for my first time! As someone who hasn't ventured out of the Charles River Basin much for the last 2 years this is exciting stuff! Sea breezes, waves and ocean ;-) The following morning, 9am and I'm making my way to the Yacht Club looking for an iPhone App that can give me all the weather information I need.

The Weather Channel - 4 Stars App Store Rating


First stop was the trusty Weather Channel app with a 4 star rating. To be honest, it's pretty good, giving a detailed hour by hour breakdown of wind speed and direction.

+ Hourly wind information with direction and strength
+ Major locations around the world all covered
- No statistics or detailed trends







WindGuru - 2.5 Stars App Store Rating



Next up I downloaded the WindGuru App with 2.5 Start Rating . This is a simplified version of their website, presenting the key information in a format optimized for mobile.

For sailors, surfers and windsurfers the key advantage of wind guru is the ability to get detailed information on specific spots around the word.

But since I was going to Marblehead, which is also featured on the Weather Channel.

And the major disadvantage.... information is only presented for 3 hour periods

+ Simple and easy to use
+ Wind speed & direction, Wave height & direction
+ Information on key windsurfing, sailing and surfing spots
- Wind information only presented for 3 hour periods


Wind Alert - 3 Stars App Store Rating

Wind Alert links with weather stations around the world and
collects real-time information on wind speeds and direction.

The app then extrapolates wind speeds and directions for the following 6 hours. However, the extrapolation doesn't seem to be very sophisticated, and doesn't link with other forecasting information. So, if wind speeds have increased from 5 to 10mph that's the trend that the app will extrapolate.

If you purchase a membership you can set the option to receive alerts for a particular location based on wind speeds and other parameters.

+ Detailed wind information updated every 10/15 mins from weather stations
+ Captures fluctuations and gust detail
+ Useful in conjunction with the latest forecasting information
- Basic forecasting functions only extrapolate simple trends


So, what's ended up happening is that I now have three wind apps on my iPhone (bring on OS 4 with folder options!) I like the hourly information from The Weather Channel, the wave height and presentation of WindGuru and the Real-Time data from windAlert!

Or perhaps I should just resort back to reading clouds.....

Hello & Welcome

This is a weekly review of current Outdoor Apps for iphone. Over the next few months I'll be covering apps for sailing, cycling, hiking and more, using the local Boston area as a testing ground.

Thanks for visiting