Hot on the heels of the first geocaching tool for iPhone, iTrail by Justin Davis (£1.80) records your position and altitude over time to calculate speed and distance (horizontal and vertical) travelled during sports activities—a great addition to the growing list of fitness-related apps for the device. Tracks are stored locally for comparison, but GPX and KML export is planned (and should permit use for geotagging with a "real" camera). Meantime you can graphically plot distance vs. speed or altitude (preview) and view your tracks on a Google Map (preview) within this very cool app.
5 responses to First track logger for iPhone released
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I knew I needed a GPS iPhone ;)
Just hope the iPhone can cope with all the abuse it will get whilst being thrashed around the hills. The iPhone remains a bit of a lump when compared to the Garmin Forerunner "watches" though - fanny pack probably required...
I hear you D :-|
I'm just blown away by the ingenuity of some of these iPhone developers, considering how new this platform is. Granted the App Store has its fair share of "me too" efforts with little point to their existence, but it's great to see others pushing the boundary's of what's possible in their v1.0 apps. The sheer genius of "early" apps like this, Comic Touch, FileMagnet, Things, and 1Password et al must bode well for the future. I think it's more likely that the iPhone will have to evolve to match the capabilities of the developers, rather than the developers struggling to step up to the potential of the device. And then there's the beauty... some of these apps (1Password, Things, Twitterrific, etc.) are so beautifully crafted I find myself opening them just to look again! I shudder in horror at the thought of having to return to simple and functional Palm OS, or inelegant and cluttered Windows Mobile.
Update 06.08.08: Justin added export to GPX and KML to version 1.1, which cleverly works by uploading the data to Google Docs (Google Account required). Several things to note:
I just did a quick test of iTrail on my 3G iPhone. I had to do some scripting on the log file due to the fact that it doesn't contain a time stamp, but the results are good, and gpicsync placed the images very well based on the log file from the iPhone.
And Justin has confirmed that he'll try to add time stamps in the next version.
You can see my results here.
Living that close to Oslo eirikso you might have got quite reasonable results even with a 2G iPhone. I have recently seen a track log recorded on a 2G iPhone in a very urban area (London) which was accurate to street-level—that's impressive, with no GPS involved!
I ran another test myself in the opposite extreme, a rural location in the Peak District. iTrail was in this case unable to triangulate my position with any accuracy, and did not record any movement over my 2 hour walk. As you can see from the track log recorded by my GPS logger (shown in pink), I was not stationary ;-)