Slashgeo

Maps are reaching new places such as music players. This ipodsubwaymaps website is offering subway maps on the iPod music player. They are facing legal threats but it is an interesting case of geoinformation use. This is discussed by Wired and other sources such as news.com.

The GEObLog (in spanish) links to geospatially related uses of iPods and portable media players. Amongst the links, there is iPod Directions, which "is a powerful step-by-step directions saving tool that will export online driving directions from results by Yahoo Maps and import them into your iPod". There's also iSubway Maps and SoundWalk, the latter offers audio tours. Finally, the National Geographic Traveler lists nine ways the iPod phenomenon altered the way we travel. See also related stories below for other mapping uses of iPods.

With the iPhone launch tomorrow, there's plenty of generic stories on the net. GeoThought shortly discuss Google Maps on the iPhone, and All Points Blog has a critical evaluation of the iPhone foreseen capabilities. From GeoThought: "They say "one of the most useful tools available on the Internet today is maps (sic), and Google Maps on the iPhone is amazing". It does have a number of flashy user interface features that aren't available on other versions of Google Maps." From APB: "The only thing I can see that is somewhat innovative is the integration the iPhone has with its other features. That is, when you select a particular POI, let's say a restaurant, and you touch the pin location on the map display, the user is able to see and then dial the phone number for that establishment." See also this previous entry by Ed Parsons and more below.

A friend wrote to inform me that within the new MacOS X Leopard (10.5) to be available in 9 days, there seems to be some geospatial awareness at the operating system level, well, more precisely GPS metadata support directly in Preview, the default small application that open any PDF and image file: "GPS Metadata Support: Get real information from your photos. If your image has embedded GPS metadata, Preview will show you exactly where that perfect photo was taken. Open the Image inspector and select GPS. Preview pinpoints the location where you took the photo on a world map. From there you can even open the GPS location in Google Maps." Not exactly groundbreaking, but still nice to see such integration. See also related stories below.

Ogle Earth informs us Apple Leopard's Dashcode supports KML and GeoRSS directly: "MacOS X 10.5 Leopard comes with DashCode, a tool for developing widgets to populate the Mac's dashboard... One of the pre-made templates is for a Google Map, and all you have to do — literally — is add a GeoRSS or KML URL, get a Google Maps API key, and publish." See also related stories below. Update: 11/21 17:12 GMT by S : Due to a surprisingly high popularity of this story, I moved it from section to main page.

The location capabilities for the iPhone has been discussed quite a few times here, see related stories below, but also this discussion on whether the iPhone needs GPS capabilities or not. Now Mapperz informs us a third-party GPS add-on for the iPhone and iPod Touch will start shipping in February at the price of 89$US. Great news: the software used is open source, bad news: it requires your iPhone/iPod Touch to be 'jailbroken' (maybe this will change with the upcoming SDK?). The description: "The iphone locoGPS module allows jail broken iphones to finally have GPS functionality. This module is in development and will be shipping in February. All software is open source and more applications are being written every day. The locoGPS module gives you the ability to explore all the benefits of GPS from a device that is small enough to put on a keychain." There's also Google's My Location new feature which works on the iPhone now.

Here's a few recent Apple related geonews. First is the capacity for Mac owners to run Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D using the new VMWare Fusion: "Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D doesn’t yet run in a Mac OS X browser. Until recently, your only option was to install a copy of Windows on a different partition using Apple’s Bootcamp tool, and boot into it. [...] Sometime in the last few months, however, competitor VMWare came out with an update of their virtualization tool for Mac, Fusion, that does support VE3D." Additionally, The Map Room shares a complete guide to geotagging photos on the Mac. And finally, APB informs us Apple is encouraging iPhone users to help update the Skyhook wifi location database. On a side note, mentioning Apple products looks reasonable since they are increasingly popular even within geospatial professional, with now 14% of computer sold last February and almost a monopoly on portable music devices. Related previous stories added below, including an old one on running ArcGIS on MacOS X, but I admit omitting the numerous previous stories on geotagging photos.