I’ve been using a couple of useful mapping apps on my iPhone. The useless battery makes it very limited as a navigation device. However if you’re out with a paper map and lost, then GB Locate at 59p (iTunes) will give you an OS grid location with little fuss.

GB Locate

A second useful iPhone App is iOSMaps (iTunes) which provides Ordnance Survey Maps on the iPhone. It works well providing a wifi connection is available and it’s free to download.

iOS Maps Â

Click the icons to go to the respective developer sites.

We used My Moving Map for this activity (mentioned in a recent post), which was designed as a quick 5 minute demonstration of some of the differences between paper and digital maps.

download the GPS track for Google Earth

Google Earth on the iPhone

I’ve just been testing it, and OMG as my daughter frequently proclaims! The interface is incredibly intuitive. The search box also brought up my contacts list, so the first place I visited was my parents house…

Butterleigh

The iPhone’s GPS quickly found my location in Google Earth, one obvious advantage over the normal platform.

GPS auto-location

Panning and zooming is simple – a combination of finger taps and movements. Tilting the phone also tilts the view. 3D terrain works!  The developers have also made use of the iPhone’s landscape orientation enabling a wider view. Here’s Snowdon in it’s new, high resolution imagery.

Snowdon in 3D

Finally, the Panoramio and Wikipedia layers are available, as are the borders and places layers from the parent application.

Panoramio

This is brilliant news. Walking out of my house and away from my wifi link slowed everything right down so I won’t be seeing myself in real time scrambling over Crib Coch. On the next upgrade I wonder if we’ll see the ability to add placemarks?

Update: Google Earth help notes / Ogle Earth’s rather more considered review!

Seismometer records vibrations using iPhone’s built in accelerometer to “measure movements in two axes, calculate the resulting energy and draw the results on a rolling logarithmic scale.” There are many favourable reviews on the iTunes store and at 59p it’s somewhat cheaper than the classroom alternative.
In fact Seismometer would be perfect to use with my Shaker Maker – do it yourself earthquake table.

Other iPhone Apps that I’d like to try out include:

Earthscape:

Earthscape is a virtual globe, though resolution outside the US is fairly poor. It’s currently available as a free download. (iTunes link)

GPS Kit

GPS kit looks like an indispensible application to make the best use of the phones GPS. (iTunes link) It costs a few pounds though. I guess I just want to be able to replicate as many features of my Garmin Etrex as possible.

Aside from the three geography-related applications, I suppose I’d get some kind of Twitter client since my current phone is rubbish for that kind of thing. I also love the idea of the free WordPress application to be able to add and edit posts on my blogs rather more spontaneously than at present.