Trails 2.0 - Infopage
I have switched to iPhone OS 3.0 without jailbreak a view weeks ago and I’m really feeling happy with this decision.
And as one of my App-Tests I now gave Trails another try – it’s now version 2.0.
The test-trail was about 6km and the duration was about 3h 45min – don’t wonder why it took me so long… the kids have joined me!
Trails has stored 495 waypoints during this test and have been set almost 100% on the ways showed in the map – so this was a positive result of the testing.
During the test I recognized several crashes of the application – trails terminated sometimes when I tried using the camera feature to take a photo related to the current position. All in all that was no problem because it was always possible to restart the session at the last waypoint without loosing data – and the taken photo also was stored.
What about the battery? Well – it works now much better because the display is faded out after not touching the screen and therefor the energy consumption shrinks dramatically. For this session it took about 50% of the overall battery capacity. I think that’s ok for the most trails. If you need more power you should look for an external battery tank like 3GJUICE.
The export of the trail to the Mac OS X application ‘TrailRunner’ worked like a charm and the map showed up the trail in a usable way.
Schneerosenweg - Kufstein
The iPhone can assist you with the build in GPS tracker. Basically it’s used to find your current position and displayes it on the GoogleMaps app which is bundled with the iPhone.
Beside this app there are also some additional navigation tools available on the iTunes store – some are paid apps, some for free…
I was looking for an app which is tracking my paths in the background and shows me the data afterwards in a way that can be used with an external app on my MBP.
What I found was ‘Trails’ – a little app which syncs via mail, TrailRunner application hosted on my MBP over WiFi and a direct account at ‘EveryTrail’.
I played around a little bit with Trails – and I have to say that the export is really working perfect for me. So it was time to test the app on the road.
And well – that is the point here which is giving me a ‘no go’ for this app: I mentioned that the app is definitly not working on standby mode – so you always will have to run the application in the ‘open’ mode which shows up the following problems:
+ display is on – so the power is exhausting very, very fast
+ buttons are on duty –> sometimes you push them when you don’t want to
Other apps support ‘Button-locking’ and / or ‘Display dimming’ – which would solve both issues I found with this app…
Another big problem: incoming calls end the app –> no more waypoints are stored until you restart the app; you don’t have to answer the incoming call – it’s enough that the call is there… bad behavior
I tried to put the iPhone into standby when the app is still open – but (as mentioned above) it didn’t work.
In my opinion the app is not working for me because the power is running out too fast to use it on a longer trail.
What I will have to try in the next days is to test the app with a jailbroken iPhone which supports background tasks… we’ll see.
I know – there’s another app available: MotionX GPS (Lite). But this app does not support the export functionality I expect of such an application… Trails seems here really to be the better choice…