We're not 100% convinced of the safety of his approach, but Kevin Miller's determination to recover his lost iPhone -- combined with the power of MobileMe's new Find My iPhone feature -- led him on a wild chase across Chicago, which he visited while he was attending a LEGO convention in nearby Wheeling, IL.

After leaving his phone in a bar, Kevin tried to get FMI working (via a friend's laptop & broadband adapter, ironically from Sprint; as Megan & Michael pointed out, you can't access the MobileMe page from the iPhone browser anyway) with no luck. The next morning, however, the phone began responding and Kevin's three-man team began the hunt. With laptop in hand and a succession of more and more specific location details, the guys began tracking down the errant phone.

We won't spoil the end of the story for you; Kevin's post is quite entertaining and worth a read. Still, once you do know how the plot turns out you may want to consider enlisting the police for a missing phone, rather than choosing to use their methods.

It looks like our European friends will get first crack at an advanced turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone/iPod touch. MobileNavigator Europe [App Store] requires the 3.0 software, and looks to be fully featured:

• 2D and 3D map displays
• Can be used in portrait and landscape format
• Branded UI features such as Reality View Pro, Lane Assistant Pro & "real signpost display"
• Speed Assistant with adjustable audio-visual warning
• Direct access and navigation to contacts saved in the iPhone's address book
• The latest NAVTEQ maps, 2M+ European POIs (points of interest)
  
• Navigation is automatically resumed after an incoming phone call
• Quick access to user-defined POIs in the area and along the route
• Take Me Home function with a single click

This software is the first of several apps coming for the iPhone. The TomTom app that will work in the U.S. has been demoed and coming soon. Garmin, one of the premier GPS manufacturers is going the other way, and will release their own phone with navigation built in, but the project has been troubled and much delayed. Telenav has pre-announced its iPhone offering and suggested that customers keep an eye on the company's Twitter feed.

The Navigon app is US $94.99 (!) this month only, then the price goes up (!!!). The Navigon website doesn't yet show a list of the supported countries, but it's displayed in iTunes and is quite extensive (Albania to Vatican City with Estonia, Macedonia, San Marino & Slovenia + more in between). The app supports ten different languages and will automatically switch based on the selected language for the iPhone itself. The download weighs in at 1.65 GB.

This quick release of high quality navigation software should set mouths watering for a release over here, but I'm a bit troubled by the pricing, as you can buy a pretty fully featured low-end navigator for only a few more dollars.

Update: Our readers have also mentioned Gokivo, with a continuing US$9.95 a month subscription, and Sygic, which provides turn by turn navigation in Austrailia and New Zealand.

Thanks to Gaspare for the original tip and our alert readers for more suggestions!

Normally the Lonely Planet guides for iPhone are $15.99, so any way you look at it, getting the San Francisco guide (iTunes link) for free is a great purchase. At worst you'll see if you like the Lonely Planet way of doing things in a travel guide and at best you might discover something new in San Francisco. Yep, the guide is free in anticipation of WWDC, allowing attendees to do a little sightseeing if Apple's sessions aren't enough for you.

I've only spent a bit of time with the app (I'm not in San Francisco, so testing the "nearby" functions won't happen until next week), but if you're familiar with the Lonely Planet guide books, you'll be pretty familiar with the content here. The app has a really long list for the table of contents, something I felt could be handled better. If you want to find travel information, for example, you'll have to scroll somewhere about 40% down -- this is not optimal if you need info in a hurry. In fact, scrolling through longs lists is so annoying Apple gave the iPod app a search tool and Coverflow browsing. Luckily the LP guide provides a text search which I found quite useful.

Browsing content is terrifically easy, with a slim design that allows you to move forward and back between articles, increase text size or go back up to whatever screen you were previously at, like a search page. Speaking of those searches and the content, a cursory search for Moscone brought up no precise info on the convention center. It is mentioned in a reference to Yerba Buena, but otherwise lacks details.

The map suffers from static information and a lack of one-way street info (kind of important in cities filled with them, but only if you drive). I much prefer the maps and interaction of the AAA Discounts app, complete with animation and cleaner graphics. There are complaints about missing hotels and whatnot, but I've never fully trusted any guidebook to find every hotel and restaurant. Plus, there's always Urbanspoon and a plethora of apps for discovering new places to eat around you.

Obviously if you are ever planning to travel to San Francisco it'd be hard to turn down a free app so full of info. I don't think it'll replace anything like your Maps app, or Urbanspoon, or Yelp-based apps, but that's not the point. As a guide full of history and photos, hotel and restaurant data, workable maps and tons of "getting around" data, the Lonely Planet San Francisco City Guide is incredibly handy.

How many times have you looked at an Address Book contact address, only to realize that you don't know where they're located? What do you do? Most would copy and paste the address into Google Maps, but there is a better way!

In a contact's Address Book card, right-clicking on an address and clicking on "Map Of" will launch your default browser and map out the address in Google Maps.

If you are using Tiger, you will need to install a plug-in, however, this tip works beautifully in Mac OS X Leopard.


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

This post will initially have a limited audience--residents of New York City--but I think the idea behind it is interesting enough that other folks might benefit as well. Khoi Vinh has whipped up a cool NYC subway map for the iPhone that takes advantage of the iPhone's thumbnail system for photos. Basically, he's cut up the MTA subway map in such a way that you can pan across the map with the forward and back buttons. The map tiles also overlap a little bit on all sides to make panning more natural. So taking this idea, apparently originally borrowed from Mike Essl, I figured other iPhone aficionados might well whip up similar maps for their own particular circumstances.

[via MacVolPlace]

I am not a cartographer, but I do enjoy a good map. Ortelius looks like it will be a very nice addition to any map maker's Dock. Ortelius is a program that has been designed from the get go to do one thing, and do it well: draw maps. As the product page points out addons to other drawing programs will allow you to make maps, but those programs weren't designed for it. Ortelius has a number of stock drawing tools that allow you to focus on the important thing: getting that map right.

Ortelius will allow you to highlight routes on maps you've created, create PDFs, and print out the maps. Ortelius is still under development but will be available soon for less than $50.

[via The Map Room, which is a great blog about all map related things.]

I have a confession to make: even though I was there at the iPhone launch, I haven't actually purchased an iPhone. Yes, I'm part of that supposedly small (though I think there are quite a few of us) group of Mac fans who have chosen not to shell out $2k over the next few years to own a little piece of the revolution.

But I still want to be on the cutting edge of the iPhone zeitgeist and that's why I think this little mashup is so cool. Reader ADM tells us that he's squeezed together Google Maps, Twitter, and Ning to bring you a geographic, browsable representation of what people are saying on Twitter about the iPhone. Now you too, even if you don't have an iPhone, can stay up to date about what people are saying and where they're saying it.

What's that? You don't care about the iPhone? And even if you do, you think something like this is completely silly and unnecessary? Touché. But ADM has also included the source code through Ning, so you're welcome to make your own mashup about whatever you want. Meanwhile, I and mine will continue to listen intently through the tubes, and hope for our own little bit of salvation: a price drop.

Meander, which has just hit version 1.5, is an interesting little application that lets you mark out routes on digital maps. For example, you can download maps from Google Maps or Yahoo Maps (though you're not limited to these) and then plot your own route rather than depending on the automated routing (particularly useful when you're on foot or bike). The main interface window is a translucent "Acetate", which you position over a map in a browser window (or even a PDF). You then click the snapshot button to capture the map, and draw your route. By positioning a movable scaling bar over the map scale, Meander will be able to calculate the total distance of your route, or merely the distance between any two points on the map. With Meander it's very easy to calculate distances for walking or to plot particular routes on a map which you can then save as an image file or print out. New in version 1.5 are image attachments for your route, a journal feature, and more.

Meander is $19.99 and a demo is available.

[Via MacMinute]

Like Tim Gaden over at Hawk Wings, I too love Mac OS X's highly underrated Services menu, and Robert Stainsby has released a very handy addition to it: MappingService. This clever service allows you to select an address from any application, say a website, a document or an IM, and simply chose 'Map' from your Services menu to generate a map in any one of three mapping services: Google Maps (of course), ZoomIn Australia or ZoomIn New Zealand.

MappingService is known to work on 10.4.6 and might possibly work on earlier versions of Mac OS X. It is open source software released under the BSD license, and Robert is accepting donations for his fine work.

The Google Maps Plug-in for Address Book is now in a 2.4 beta edition, bringing with it a package installer (PPC only, Intel installer on its way), support for Europe and new localized Google Maps domains, as well as choosing a default country in Google Maps for the plug-in to use.

There is a beta edition for Intel Macs, though the author states it hasn't been thoroughly tested yet. The Google Maps Plug-in is donationware and available from Brian Toth's site.

File this under "do it before they get a cease-and-desist" letter. iPod Directions is using the Yahoo Maps API and some clever coding to make it super easy for you to grab directions (and maps!) and put those in your iPod. Or is it on your iPod? Either way, this is a lot quicker than the way I've been doing it, which involves something known as "pen and paper" attaching the directions directly to my iPod with a "rubber band." That puts them on my iPod. Anyway, all you have to do is put in the start and finish address, and you get a nifty little ZIP file. Open it and put the contents in your iTunes Photos folder, sync, and away you go. Nifty.