My friend Mike wrote to ask:
“A year or so ago you posted updates about your location during a trip from New England to home. Do you remember which tracking tool or website you used? A friend of mine is planning to bike across the country next summer and something like that would make his wife feel a lot better.”
First I’m going to answer the question that he asked, and then I’m going to give some “better” answers.
Each year on Christmas Eve, I drive overnight for about 12 hours to my mother’s house. I wanted to give people some way to track my progress so that they’d know where I was without me having to call (which would either wake up my family and/or require me to talk on the phone while driving) or text (even worse while driving).
Last year I used GPS Tracker by InstaMapper, which is completely free; you can setup a website that will show people your progress. It’s a great solution, and the app worked really well, but there were just a few shortcomings. First, due to limitations of iOS at the time, the app had to be running in the foreground for it to work. Also, the process of setting it up was a little convoluted. If you look at the reviews on iTunes, you’ll also see a whole lot of iPod touch users who don’t seem to understand that location detection works much better on iPhones and 3G iPads than it does on the iPod touch.
Sadly, the app has not been updated since November 2008, meaning that there is no iOS 4 compatibility to use the background API for GPS updates, and there’s also no iPad app.
The good news is that there are at least two other options, and both are free. Click “Read More” to check them out.
Continue reading Three iOS apps to automatically track your location
Three iOS apps to automatically track your location originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 10 Dec 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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