Blog Archives

Google City Tours Adds Walking Directions, Custom Maps [Travel]

Posted on December 30, 2009
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Six months after launching City Tours in Labs, Google’s Maps team has tweaked the interface and made it more friendly to how people actually vacation: head to a city, pick places to go, and get precise directions to them.

At launch, City Tours did a decent job of knowing neat places to go inside a city, and even knew (sometimes) when they were open and what they cost. All it did for the traveler, though, was tell you how far apart those destinations were. Now City Tours includes detailed walking directions in your itinerary. And if you’re a My Maps nerd who’s picked out spots to visit on your own, you can import it and lay those map points over the cities that Google has picked out, so you get a mix of suggestions and pre-picked favorites.

There’s more to the latest upgrade, detailed at the blog post below. Have you used City Tours for a real, honest-to-goodness vacation? Tell us what works, and what you needed to DIY, in the comments.






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MapQuest Navigator Brings Cheap Turn-by-Turn GPS to the iPhone [Downloads]

Posted on October 9, 2009
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iPhone only: Mapquest Navigator is a new turn-by-turn application for the iPhone that brings GPS to your phone on a budget. The question is: When will Google Maps do the same?

The application costs $1 in the App Store, which buys you a 14-day trial. If you decide you like the app and want to continue using it once those 14 days are up, MapQuest Navigator requires you pay subscription pricing: $4/month, $10/quarter, or $30/year—which makes it a good deal less expensive than AT&T's $10/month subscription GPS app.

MapQuest Navigator is far from the first turn-by-turn GPS in the App Store, but it is one of the least expensive for the feature set it offers (though you can’t get any cheaper than previously mentioned Waze‘s free offering). All the maps and directions come over your data connection, which means it’s a light download and generally will have up-to-date points of interest, but if you’ve got a bad data connection you may be better off opting for one of the offline GPS apps like Navigon or TomTom.

Still, the most interesting thing about MapQuest releasing a GPS app: It makes one wonder just how long it’ll be before Google offers their own (presumably free) turn-by-turn GPS app. We know Google can do text-to-speech (hell, they’re even great at speech-to-text), and now that they’re tracking traffic conditions for freeways, highways, and major streets, it seems like a natural progression. On top of that, I’ve tested a lot of turn-by-turn GPS apps, and Google Maps is still the app that does the best job of locating me quickly and accurately on a map.

MapQuest Navigator is currently available for the iPhone only.

MapQuest Navigator [iTunes App Store via MapQuest Blog via Gizmodo]






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Gsalr Finds Garage Sales and Plans an Effective Route [Sales]

Posted on August 3, 2009
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If you’re looking to hit some garage sales, forget combing over the local paper and trying to put together a route. Gsalr makes finding and mapping garage sales a breeze.

Similar to previous mentioned Yard Sale Treasure Map, although a bit more polished, Gsalr helps you find and map garage sales in your area. Plug a zip code or state and city into Gsalr and you’ll be given a Google Maps mashup with local garage sales flagged. Each red flag represents a garage sale listing, clicking on it gives you a summary of the Craiglist listing, a link to the full post if it’s lengthy, the days the sale is going on, and address of the location.

The “Add to Trip Planner” button lets you easily toss a sale you like into the route maker. When you’re all done browsing the listings click on the Trip Planner tab in the upper right corner and get a handy turn by turn driving route to help you hit all the garage sales in the most effective way. If you know of another tool for helping you discover goods to repurpose and deals to score, let’s hear about it in the comments.





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Save and Share Google Maps Directions with My Maps [UltraNewb]

Posted on April 23, 2009
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The My Maps feature of Google Maps has been around for quite sometime, but if you are a regular Google Map user and you’re not using it to share common directions, it’s worth it.

The Google LatLong blog (Google's official blog for all things Google Earth and Maps) has a simple beginner's tutorial for using the My Maps feature to customize and save directions—complete with notes—so you've got a repository of common directions with helpful annotation.

As I said, this isn’t a new feature by any means, but it’s something that I’ve used several times here at Lifehacker (see the embedded map) and to share directions with friends and family. If you’ve used My Maps, let’s hear what you’re using it for in the comments.





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Yard Sale Treasure Map Plots Out Your Weekend Plundering [Sales]

Posted on April 11, 2009
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Yard Sale Treasure Map is a Google Maps mashup designed to help you find and easily get to Craigslist-posted yard sales in your area.

You enter a starting address, a driving radius, and select from Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Yard Sale Treasure Map then queries Craiglist for your area, and returns a route that will take you to all the yard sales it finds. You can click on the markers for each sale to see additional information about the sale and delete them if you’re not interested. You can also add in sales that you find from other sources, like your local paper, by either putting the address in the left sidebar or double clicking on the map to place a new marker. This surprisingly elegant hack is free to use.





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