Wednesday, November 10, 2010

TNR 11/9/10 - Bridges!

Update: ampers did a really cool piece on the Bridges of Hennepin county! It's only 90 seconds, click on it!

Every bridge that crosses the Mississippi within the beltway! That's 18 if you didn't know already. Those are the "shore to short vehicle allowed, distinct" bridges. We have a pretty high standard. If you just counted the number of times you went over a land to land span it would have been 38. Not too shabby!

I was running two mapping applications and Tom was running a third. It was an interesting experiment to see the different options. These are all Android apps, BTW.

Instamapper (Application name: GPS Tracker)
Pros: Always on so it's easy to define start and end points, simple web interface,
Cons: Not highly configurable, not a lot of statistics available

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com





EveryTrail (as reviewed by Tom)
Pros: Seems to be very robust in the current version, allows you to either see the map or see overall statistics as you're going, the display interface for afterward is pretty solid, it seems to prioritize the data collection such that whatever might be going on with the phone, it gets the data anyway
Cons: It can be slow to respond to input, can't see both the map and stats at the same time, display interface on their website uses flash, which I hate


Google MyTracks
Pros: Lots of display information, super easy upload to My Maps, quite accurate despite GPS quality
Cons: Hard to tell if you're recording, stats good but don't filter obvious GPS errors, have to remember to start and stop recording. :)



View TNR - Bridges! in a larger map



I think it all comes down to what your needs and personal opinions are. None of these are rubbish, and for certain needs some of them are stellar. But I don't think there is a consensus or best practices for what a navigation recorder needs to be. Someday...