Planning some activities out on the town this weekend, or searching for a Mother's Day dining option? The fine folks at Schmap have a treat for you -- they'd like TUAW readers to have the first whack at their new iPhone City Guides and Local Search before the Mobile Safari-optimized site goes into official beta on Monday, May 12.
Point Safari on your iPhone or iPod Touch to www.schmap.com, then enter the pre-launch preview access code: 724627. Once you're in the site, pull up a Schmap Guide for your favorite city for info, maps, and more. Some of the search features aren't wired in yet, but they should be done soon.
Schmap's website has several Flash demos of the features of the Schmap Guides for iPhone. Check it out!
Thanks to Donald at Schmap for the invitation, and Kyle for the tip.
I never had one of those big world maps as a kid, the kind you put pushpins in to indicate all the places you've traveled -- I'd been thinking about getting one for my children, but now I might as well go digital with Knapsack 1.0, a Leopard-only travel planning tool.
Knapsack lets you build your itinerary (with the requisite pushpin world map), create checklists and postcards for each destination, and plan your daily activities for each trip. Once your itinerary is locked, you can send it out to family or colleagues so they can track you down if needed. Knapsack's got a clean, Bento-ish UI that soothes the travel-anxious brain (see the screencast for a sample).
For $39.95, it's a bit of a unitasker -- if you're already using a notebook, organizer or task-managementapp, it may be easier to leave your itineraries with the rest of your stuff. One might have expected Knapsack to implement iCal sync or integrated search with Orbitz, Expedia, etc., but I imagine that there are plenty of future features in the works.
You're on a trip. You want to order in pizza. What's the easiest way to do this on your iPhone? Open up Maps and tap the "locate me button" at the bottom-left corner of your screen. Wait for Google Maps to find you and then type "Pizza" into the search box and tap Search. Maps automatically searches near the "locate me" results--finding all the pizza delivery services near your actual location. Tap on any blue "disclose" button to find the phone, home page, and address for each item.
Of course, you're not limited to pizza. Search for shoe repair or pediatricians or any other retail type or service.
I don't know about you all, but considering I'm not in the market for a pricey, tiny notebook, and I don't need yet another thing hooked up to my TV, the best news I heard at the Keynote today was about this iPhone "January update" (does that mean there'll be one every month?) coming soon to your iTunes. Included in the free update to iPhone users:
An updated Maps that will actually find your location automatically by triangulating cell towers (we saw this a while ago), and give you the option to add a pin to the map
Web Clips, cutouts of web pages that you can attach to an icon sitting right there on the homescreen.
A customizable homescreen and dock (just hold an icon to get them wiggling, and then move them around as you please), and up to nine homescreen pages total
The update will also add chapter navigation for iPhone video, and subtitle/audio options as well.
And though the readers in our IRC channel weren't very impressed with this one, the iPhone will now feature multiple SMS sending.
Very awesome update for the iPhone, completely free and available on download in iTunes right now (!), and definitely an update that will set the stage for all the third party applications we're supposed to see next month. Bring on the SDK!
Reader Roger Kenny tipped us off to his cool site for iPhone-using New York Subway travelers. We've seen iPhone subway maps for New York before, and of course Google Maps is always available on the iPhone, but Roger's site goes even further. Not only can you see maps of the lines (via links to the MTA's website) and get directions (via HopStop), but he's also put together an RSS reader that will scroll subway alerts, and other news sites, across the top of your iPhone. If you spend any amount of time navigating New York's subways, it's definitely worth a bookmark.
I wish we had something like it for Chicago. Yes, our El stops (although, strangely enough, while I was writing this story it occurs to me that everyone in Chicago actually calls it "the train"-- I haven't heard it called the El since I moved here) are on Google Maps, but has anyone seen an iPhone "transit portal" for the Windy City? If so, toss it in the comments below, and those of us with big shoulders will thank you.
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.
Wow. The things you can learn from Apple commercials. Notice anything about that map icon? It looked mighty familiar to me and as TUAW reader Brian noted in our comments, that's a wee stylized image of 1 Infinite Loop, Apple Headquarters--or at least...kind of. The arrow looks more like it's on North de Anza Boulevard than Infinite Loop itself, but it's close enough for me. Here are a bunch of other things I've noticed about iPhone maps.
We got a great look at the keyboard interface, when doing the Maps search. The QWERTY keyboard includes a shift button, a delete button, an option to switch to a numeric view, and a search button (which I assume is the same as "return").
It looks like the interaction order is: Search, select a pin, press the (>) button on the link, and then view the location information.
Pacific Catch is a real restaurant. I called it up and spoke briefly to a hostess named Fancy (like the adjective). "We've been getting calls all morning from all over the country. People want to know if we're a real business. We are."
When we last mentionedTrailRunner it was pitched primarily as a tool for making your iPod into a workout tool. The newly released version 1.3 expands its functionality considerably with support for importing routes from the recently released Garmin Training Center as well as workout information from the Nike + iPod kit. Now with TrailRunner you can plan and mark out your route in color on USGS (or other) topographical maps, download those maps to your iPod (as photos), record your actual run/bike ride/hike on your Garmin GPS (like the Forerunner, right), and re-upload that tracking information to TrailRunner for analysis and comparison with others. TrailRunner can also import and export KML files for use with Google Earth.
As before, TrailRunner is a free download, but donations are requested.
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.
iSale, the application our own Scott McNulty dubbed 'the Delicious Library for eBay auctions', has been bumped to version 3.1 with some very useful site interactivity and significant changes under the hood. iSale 3.1 can now relist unsold auctions and allow you to watch how many people have looked at and are watching your auction - right from within iSale. An improved widget can also display the watch count, hit count, highest bid and feedback from the highest bidder. Last in this new version is a localized and active links preview for English, German and French languages. Under the hood, iSale has been tuned for an upcoming change to eBay's communication standards which goes live on July 1st.
For a refresher, here's a list of the other features iSale already offers: beautiful auction templates, a 'funky pinboard' with photos of auction items, one-click locating of buyers with Google Maps, 'Smart Date' simplified auction scheduling, description importing from Amazon and eBay, Address Book/Mail integration, .Mac syncing, iCal scheduling and much more.
iSale 3.1 is a Universal Binary, offers a three-auction demo and sells for $39.95 USD. Upgrades from iSale 2.x are $14.90 USD.
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.
The National
Geographic website has posted nine great tips for
travelers with iPods. Some of their tips are pretty obvious, like creating playlists and purchasing audio books
that reflect your destination. Others are more clever, like downloading audio travel guides from the likes of iJourneys.com, and podcasting your adventure by making on-the-spot audio recordings of those exotic locales
(provided you don't have a 5G iPod). Finally, they suggest tossing paper maps for digital versions you can get from
places like ipodsubwaymaps.com and PodQuest. Sounds great...so where are we
going?
Now, I love
Google Maps. Since its inception, it's been my default online maps site. I view it as the logical evolution of the
industry which started with MapQuest and melded into Yahoo! Maps which gave rise to Google Maps. At various times of my
Internet chronology, I've been an enthusiastic user of each.
LifeHacker has given us instructions for putting
Google Maps on
your iPod Photo and now Yahoo a third-party programmer has answered with a web application that
allows you to enter directions between two points, then zips the results into a .zip file for download. All you do then
is unzip the file and place the images in your Photos library for it to upload to your iPod. Yahoo This
service is being called iPodiWay. It's really not a bad idea.
Planning some activities out on the town this weekend, or searching for a Mother's Day dining option? The fine folks at Schmap have a treat for you -- they'd like TUAW readers to have the first whack at their new iPhone City Guides and Local Search before the Mobile Safari-optimized site goes into official beta on Monday, May 12. 
I never had one of those 
You're on a trip. You want to order in pizza. What's the easiest way to do this on your iPhone? Open up Maps and tap the "locate me button" at the bottom-left corner of your screen. Wait for Google Maps to find you and then type "Pizza" into the search box and tap Search. Maps automatically searches near the "locate me" results--finding all the pizza delivery services near your actual location. Tap on any blue "disclose" button to find the phone, home page, and address for each item.
Reader 
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 
When we 
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.
The National
Geographic website has posted 
Now, I love
Google Maps. Since its inception, it's been my default online maps site. I view it as the logical evolution of the
industry which started with MapQuest and melded into Yahoo! Maps which gave rise to Google Maps. At various times of my
Internet chronology, I've been an enthusiastic user of each.
