How would you like to be able to not only recall where you went on your trip, but see photos from different locations and notes you took about events that happened during that time? Well, thanks to GPS technology and everyone’s most trustworthy personal assistant, you can share your trip experience.

In this article, I’m going to show you an iPhone application that can help you do all of that and more. So the next time you take a trip somewhere, no matter how small, you can keep track of those moments you’ll want to remember.

What Is HipGeo?

HipGeo is “the most convenient way to track where you go, take photos, record the world around you, and tell the story about where you’ve been or traveled.” It provides families and groups of friends an easy way to automatically share a moment, event, or trip without sending that information out to the whole world.

HipGeo lets you know where your friends and loved ones are with auto-updates or at your request, and you can use it to share your location, a place, a route, or photos through its integration with Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and email.

HipGeo, as you might have guessed, utilized GPS tracking features to “follow” you around and keep track of the places you’ve been and things you’d like to share. Once you’ve been enough places, you can create a shareable trip to show your pictures and tell your story with an animated map and slide shows.

Using HipGeo

Once you’ve downloaded and installed HipGeo to your mobile device, you can utilize its “Places” mode to track the places you visit (but not your exact routes!). Its background running GPS app is supposed to help HipGeo get the information it needs while also preserving your phone’s battery life.

You can make and share comments and photos along your route, as well as create an automatic journal record of your day, keeping an accurate history of where you’ve been and what you’ve done, which is accessible through the “My Day” one-touch option, as well as via daily emails containing the previous day’s events.

HipGeo allows you to automatically share your location without much effort, or manually share places and routes with friends via SMS, email, Facebook, and Twitter. You can post a place, a travel, or your whole day if you like. Or, you can choose to keep your journeys private with HipGeo’s intuitive privacy controls. You can set your privacy level to “just me”, “just friends”, or “everyone”.

If you’re in the sharing mood, you can also create distribution lists for different groups. And you can easily invite friends from your phone’s address book, as well as Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion

HipGeo is currently only available for iOS devices, but plans are in the works for Android, etc.

I’m a big fan of useful geolocation apps and I think HipGeo is definitely one of them. Whether you’re going on a hike, road trip, or even a pub crawl, you can utilize this app to both share the great moments that happen during your trip and look back at them later on. And if you simply need directions to a place you can’t remember how to get to, you can use it for that too.

What do you think of apps like HipGeo?

Buses add an additional layer of transportation goodness that allows one to see buildings and parks without walking long distances on crowded sidewalks or deal with the oppressive heat of NYC summers.

Here are 6 great tools with NYC subway maps to help you navigate your way around NYC using the web and free applications.

Have a Windows Mobile phone? Try Metro, a personal favorite of mine. The interface is easy to use, the results are accurate, and you can get directions for over 300 cities, including New York City.

The NYC version offers directions to and from over 700 stations, tourist attractions and every subway line. It is also available in multiple languages, which makes it a great choice for international travelers.

HopStop is a great free website with accurate and comprehensive directions throughout the New York region. Need to use the subways but want to minimize the walking time to your destination? Then HopStop is for you.

It offers the ability to select whether you want more street walking over transfers, subway only, bus and subway directions, no regional rail and more. The features HopStop’s search algorithms offer make it worth visiting the site.

You can also get a free HopStop app for your iPhone, use HopStop via SMS or access the HopStop website from your Blackberry or PDA.

MTA Mobile is a text-only version of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s website, which gives you access to NYC subway maps, service notices and schedules from your smartphone or web-enabled device. All you have to do to access the site is go to MTA.Info from a mobile device. The site will automatically format itself for your device.

Trips123 looks a lot like HopStop on the surface, but it has some cool features that HopStop lacks – such as live traffic updates.

I also like the Planned Events page, which makes it easy to find out about directions and service diversions for scheduled events at the Meadowlands, Yankee Stadium and other destinations within the region. Their links section is really second to none, with links to every transit provider in the region, so you can stay up to date with schedules and service offerings.

Are you curious to know what traffic is like on a Saturday afternoon on 5th Avenue and 23rd Street? Pull up Trips123′s live traffic cameras and check out the speeding taxis, walking pedestrians and buses as they get to their destinations!

Only for the iPod, Nano and iPods that feature video, Zsubway is a free set of photos of the entire NYC subway system map. You can easily upload the photos to your iPod using iTunes and use them where ever you go. I like Zsubway because it isn’t as obvious that I’m lost as if I was using a paper map, and I can use it underground, where cell phone signals don’t work. Sorted by line, you can quickly find your way using this handy map system.

Using the familiar interface of Google Maps, Google Transit makes it easy to find transit directions in NYC. Type in your origination and destination addresses and press ‘Get Directions‘. You’ll get 3 proposed sets of directions, along with a Google map, so you can use Google Streetview to make sure you know what the subway station and your destination will look like. The map is easy to print and read if you are accustomed to Google Maps for driving directions.

Any suggestions? Let’s hear it in the comments!

Wanting to experience life as it was lived by the footloose heroes above is sending thousands on the road today who will have their movements and moments chronicled on the world wide web.

When you’re starting to plan a trip today, it’s not as easy as it was for Sal Paradise in the 1940s. You can’t simply board a greyhound and expect everything to go great. Planning and further planning are necessary to get from A to B. In this article, I will provide you with a road trip planning guide for the technology enthusiast by showing you the top web apps available for the backpacker, adventurer or holidaymaker.

Yahoo Trip Planner

This is a tool for road trip planning that will get most of the nitty gritty work done for you such as finding hotels, things to do, where to eat and it will even give you suggestions of where to go. The planner can be found here. When you first go to the trip planner, to your right you’ll see “˜Create a Trip‘. Click on this button. You will be asked to sign in with your Yahoo ID. If you do not have one you can register here.

When on the “˜Create a Trip‘ page, enter in the location to which you want to travel. This could be a country, area, city or town.

Then, you’ll be asked for information about your trip such as dates and scheduled activities such as tours and outdoor pursuits. If you’re not sure about where to stay then enter the city you’re visiting into the destination bar. This will return tons of hotels, facilities and things to do in the area, which are constantly updated with event plans and new hotels, restaurants etc”¦

The trip planner also has a Journal to keep your friends and family informed. Here, you can write about your experiences on the open road. Your family (who undoubtedly will subscribe to your journal) will be able to keep track of what’s going on with you, look at your photos and comment on them. Think of this as a kind of travel Twitter come blog.

MapQuest

Okay, so now you’ve got your ideas formulated into an envelope full of timetables, bus tickets, hotel reservations and your trusty passport. What’s next on your road trip planning to-do list? Well now, you have to know where to go. While the average internet user in you will automatically point you to Google Maps, I’d suggest using MapQuest as it is more tailored to the traveler who has a geeky side with a touch of organizational OCD.

Their maps are just as detailed as Google’s but give better information for those on-foot and in a car. For example, while you’re driving at cruising speed you may as well instruct Johnny in the seat next to you to pop open the Mac Book and see what’s to come. Along the top of the map window which is on the homepage of MapQuest you’ll see buttons like ‘Gas Prices’ and ‘Traffic’ that will inform you of the situation that lies ahead, such as low or high gas prices and traffic conditions ranging from ‘Normal’ to the dreaded ‘Road Closed’.

How about the best restaurants or what’s going on in the city? Each major urban centre will have a star beside its name. Click on that star and MapQuest will give you all the current news on what’s happening in that city.

Quest Map is also available on your iPhone. To find it, the best thing to do is open up the Apple App Store and type MapQuest into the search bar. It is much the same as the web version with most of the same functions so I shan’t repeat myself.

Rand Mac Nally

This useful road trip planning website will give you the best info for the city you’re heading off to. Sure, the Yahoo! Trip Planner and Map Quest will give you small bursts of what’s hot in a city but Rand Mac Nally will condense the whole city and all of its thousands of energy pockets into a few articles that Johnny can read aloud whilst cruising along.

As you can see from the screenshot, there are loads of sub-categories for each city and along the left hand side; there are several options for any kind of traveler. Each city has a huge article detailing its history, cultural monuments and sights.

Rand Mac Nally is less of a planning tool and more of an idea mill from where I’m standing. Before traveling to a city, you can see what’s going on and some facts about the place like weather, population and the local culture and customs. It’s a perfect road trip planning guide.

My final advice for the tech savvy traveler in this article is to be prepared for failure. Often, while out on the road where the internet still comes via a phone line, relying totally on your Mac or iPhone for travel advice and suggestions is a silly move. The best thing (and perhaps the essence of travel itself) is to talk to the locals, see what’s going on and get the inside scoop. While it’s almost blasphemous to say on a website such as this one but the internet isn’t perfect.

On the other side of that coin however, making a journal entry on Yahoo! about how you were stranded offline for three days is interesting and makes for a great experience. Here are my Top Five Tech Travel Tips:

1. Always have spare batteries

2. Carry different plug converters for different regions

3. Charge your equipment at any chance you get Рin caf̩s, hotels, anywhere there is a plug. Free electricity!

4. Download Google Maps for your Cell Phone. This can literally be a lifesaver. Read my article on how to do it here.

5. Tweet – loads!

Any other tips?

It would be totally awesome if you could somehow take the map along. Google offers a print option but you can only print what you are able to fit on the screen which is hardly the solution you are looking for if you want to get a map of the entire city at the desired zoom level.

You can save the map as image files and go through the pain of stitching them together in Paint or Photoshop. Or you can spare yourself some trouble and get Google Maps to work offline with Google Map Buddy, which does everything for you in a click.

It doesn’t require any installation, just extract the zip file, run the executable and you are good to go.

Using the Google Map Buddy interface you can browse to the Google Maps site you want. Search for or navigate to the location you wish to create the map for. You can zoom in or out so that you can see the entire region for which you want to create the map. Let’s say you want to create a map for the city of Paris with all the major roads, landmarks and public transit stations.

Such details are visible when you are zoomed in pretty close, in which case you cannot fit all of Paris on your screen. So Google Map Buddy allows you to zoom out to a level where you can see the entire Paris on your screen (don’t worry if you can’t see the details at this zoom level) and specify the area you want to create the map for.

Now click the draw button, and draw a rectangle encompassing the entire Paris at your current zoom level. You don’t need to zoom to the desired level of detail because Google Map Buddy lets you specify the zoom level of the map that it will create. So you can zoom out to fit the required region on the screen, and then specify a higher zoom level inside the application’s toolbar to get a more detailed final map.

Once you have specified the details, hit create map and the application gets to work. It downloads the required tiles and stores them all on your hard disk. Once it has downloaded all the images it then stitches them together to create a complete detailed map according to your needs.

It can take quite some time to download and stitch all the images, so you would have to be patient while it is working. It would be nice if the application displayed a progress bar or current activity information to let the user know what it is up to.

After all the downloading and stitching together has finished, your map is viewable as a image file. You can scroll and zoom inside the map image just like any other image file that doesn’t fit completely on your screen. Put it on a USB drive, your iPod, your mobile phone (or maybe print it) to take it along. The tiles that it used to stitch together the map are also available just in case you need them, you can keep them or delete as you wish.

Do you know of any similar application you use with Google Maps? Let us know about it in the comments.

That is why I have compiled a list of 3 handy dandy features of Google Maps that you may not have known about – features that will help you make it through the day without hitting a pedestrian due to your frustrating experiences like the ones pictured above.

Google Driving Directions – Drag and Drop Routes

For those who really want to customize how they get from Point A to Point B, Google Maps has a tool that allows you to drag the route they have provided in certain directions say, because you know that the driving directions given will require you to traverse a heavily bogged down construction zone. New directions are provided on the spot, as if you had just searched for them. Here’s an example.

In light of the Los Angeles Lakers’ recent NBA Championship, here is a set of directions from the Staples Center (where they play) to The Walt Disney Concert Hall, both in Los Angeles:

Now if I decided that I wanted to go on the Harbor Freeway, CA 110 for some crazy reason, I could drag the route:

Here is a side by side comparison of the driving directions. They are automatically calculated and changed as you drag your route. Pretty neat, huh?

One thing you may need take note of is that your constant dragging back and forth may be cumbersome to sort through. You may find that the final directions you obtain after fooling around with the path is an infinite loop. Although this is a very handy feature, make sure to double check that all of the directions are feasible.

Congestion Overlays

It is every traveler’s worst nightmare to run into accidents, construction, congestion, or an overall slowing down of traffic. This is most likely why Google Driving Directions has provided an extremely useful overlay of your map that describes current driving conditions, with a full blown legend that houses live traffic updates along roads.

The only foreseeable downside to this feature is that it mostly only provides these overlays on larger roads, highways and interstates. Then again, larger roads are the ones that we worry the most about.

I’m sure all of you can read, so I won’t go into detail to explain what the colors mean. Certain icons mean certain things, for instance in the above screenshot, the warning sign denotes some type of accident or stoppage due to hazardous conditions, whereas a small man shoveling coal (or at least that’s what it looks like) denotes construction. A red circle with a line through it means that the current lane is closed.

Let’s say you have a planned event, and you would like to know what the traffic conditions will most likely be like at that time. No problem! There is a feature that allows users to choose the day of the week as well as the time of day, and Google Maps will provide a prediction based on aggregate data it has compiled previously. This should give users a better idea of what to expect on certain roads during rush hour or things of that nature:

Search Box Customizations

Although technically more than one “feature,” there are certain things to know about the direction search box that can prove to be useful when finding directions. Believe it or not, I have had more than one friend come up to me and ask me if there was a way to add multiple “checkpoints” to stop by on along their trip. It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you take time to read:

If we should decide to add a final destination (no pun intended), we can simply click the link and hooray, we have successfully set up segmented directions for a cross country road trip to the Empire State Building:

Google Driving directions also has a dropdown menu for you to choose by what medium would like to travel through. This service may be limited because most of it is still in beta, but certain locations DO give users the freedom to choose. As of now, it is limited to “by car,” “by public transit,” or “by walking”:

Finally, if we click “show options”, we can choose to have Google Driving directions search for routes that avoid toll roads or highways, or both:

So, there you have it. We hope that wherever you go, you drive safely and are aware of your surroundings. Google Driving Directions is an extremely powerful branch of Google Maps – it provides users with a lot of freedom and flexibility to roam around and explore new areas without actually going there.

This article only provides a few of the handy features that Google Driving Directions encompasses, but there is so much more to learn about. Check out other features of Google Maps, as well as their new mobile phone feature!

Has Google Maps helped you map your transit route or get your out of stuck traffic? Let us know how you have used it, in the comments.

The Google Maps API has opened up a ton of different uses of Google Maps, and some fantastic applications have been built on top of and use Google Maps. Below are nine of the best.

They range across a huge variety of categories and uses, but all can be both interesting and useful ways of using Google Maps. I’ll warn you in advance, a number of these are US-specific but most have good international alternatives.

Mapdango

Mapdango is a tool for total exploration of a given place. When you search for a city or a country, Mapdango pulls photos from Panoramio and Flickr, as well as information about relevant and important places from Wikipedia, Eventful and Google Local; in order to give you a great way to explore a city. You’ll see pictures of the city, get helpful markers for hotels, museums, parks and more, and generally have a ton of useful information to work with.

If you’re looking to spend some time in a city or country, definitely give Mapdango a try ““ it’s an event planner all by itself.

Hotspotr

More and more, I find myself walking around with my computer open, hoping and praying that I stumble across a WiFi hotspot that I can use. I always thought to myself, “there has to be a better way.”

Turns out there are a bunch, and one of the best is called Hotspotr. It’s a user-generated list of WiFi hotspots that is growing at a pretty huge rate, with over 15,000 hotspots being searched in over 3,000 cities. A simple search brings up Google Maps pegs for every hotspot, which can be narrowed down to only show free hotspots, or even only the ones in cafes.

Diaroogle

Gotta go? In an unfamiliar place, having to find a bathroom can be a nightmare. That’s what Diaroogle was created for. It’s a community-driven database of public toilets in three different cities (currently New York, San Francisco and London), complete with reviews of the bathrooms, in order to help you find an actually sanitary alternative to the nasty fast food bathrooms.

Live Sports Map

The Live Sports Map is full of live-updated sports news and scores, which can be seen and accessed based on where they’re located. Only care about Denver sports? Just hover your mouse over Denver, CO, and you’ll be updated in an instant. The site shows news around the world but is most heavily concentrated in the US. It’s fast, easy, and even provides color-coding by sport just in case you couldn’t care less about hockey scores.

NYC Bike Maps

As a New York City resident, I know that there are tons of great places to ride a bike in the city. But I have no idea where they are ““ that’s where NYC Bike Maps comes in. It’s essentially an overlay of bike routes on top of Google Maps, showing you which bike paths are on a street, which have special hours, and more importantly, where they all go. There are a bunch of different maps, and you can even search to find the ones nearest to you. This is something that needs to exist in every city, for every biker.

ZIP Codes and Area Codes

I get tons of phone calls from area codes I don’t know. Equally often, I’m sending a letter or a package, know the address but don’t have a clue what the ZIP code is. For both situations, there’s the USAnaviguide’s Area Code and Zip Code maps. Both use Google Maps to create overlays of the codes by their location, as well as make them searchable. Want to know where area code 660 is? A quick search tells me it’s in Kansas City, MO. The searches are quick, easy and useful more often than you might think.

Twittervision

Okay, these last three are more fun than useful, but all prove how cool applications can integrate with Google Maps. Twittervision shows, in real-time, Twitter updates from around the globe, by location. It’s a growing service but has huge implications ““ real-time breaking news, as well as seeing conversations as they unfold. Twittervision indexes everyone with a photo and location from their Twitter bio, and has tons of interesting people and tweets featured.

Real World Racer

Ever wanted to drive cross-country? Well, with the Real World Racer, you can. You select a start point and an end point, and suddenly you’re in a high-speed car race all over the world! The game is surprisingly difficult, but a lot of fun and a great way to kill a few minutes seeing the sights of the world as you drive through them in your super-cool red car.

Dig a Deep Hole

Did your parents ever tell you that if you dug a hole deep enough, you’d end up in China? Well, unless you live in Chile or Argentina, it’s a huge lie. That’s what I learned from the Big Hole application, which does but one simple thing ““ lets you pick a point on a map, and then tells you where, if you dug a hole to the other side of the Earth, you’d end up. Me? I’d end up in the middle of the Ocean ““ so I’m probably not going to try it any time soon. It’s a fun application, though, and a nice way to ruin all childhood wishes to dig to China.

What’s your favorite use, tweak or mashup of Google Maps? Let us all know in the comments!

Photo: thejourney1972

However, I never found any opportunity when I really needed a low-resolution digital camera, but I found myself in countless situations where I really could have used a phone with the global positioning feature.

Google’s mobile version of Google Maps has always offered the ability for mobile phone users to call up Google Maps to view the map of a particular location or search for driving directions. Later, Google added the ability for users who had a GPS-enabled phone or Smartphone to locate their current location through satellite triangulation.

This is a very cool feature of Google Maps, and one that sets it above most other free mobile mapping applications. However, since such a small percentage of Google Mobile users actually own a GPS-enabled phone, Google decided to add GPS Tracking to Google Maps. It’s an amazing technology that offers any cellphone user, regardless of GPS functionality, the ability to zero in on your current location. Google Maps does this the moment you start up the application on your cellphone, as shown here on my Cingular Smartphone.

That little blue dot in the middle of the map is the magical location icon that represents your current location. If you have GPS on your mobile, the Google Maps accuracy is phenomenal. If you don’t have GPS on your phone, Google triangulates your position using the three closest cell towers. There are both pros and cons to using this approach in order to identify your current location. The only con is that the accuracy of GPS is usually within only a couple hundred feet. The accuracy of Google’s new “My Location” features can range as wide as 5000 meters. The pros, however, are:

• “My Location” works faster than GPS, since cell towers are quicker to access than GPS satellites.
• The positioning feature works anywhere your phone can reach a cellphone signal, including indoors.
• Unlike when you use GPS, your phone’s battery will not drain any faster than normal.

Use Google Maps Mobile to Plan Your Trip

The feature of Google Maps that I personally use the most is the Satellite View. In this mode, Google Maps switches to the popular Google satellite imaging feature, where the map is replaced with a real satellite image of your location (dated back a few weeks or months.) My next order of business was to switch to Satellite View and then map out some directions.

Here you can see the amazing clarity of the satellite view. The menu items show all of the things that you can do with Mobile Maps, including mapping out driving, walking, or transit directions, showing local traffic patterns (if you live in or near a city), using GPS, marking favorite locations, and even options like locating the map for any address listed in your phone’s contact list. My next step was to determine directions and distance for me to drive from Southern Maine to Los Angeles, California.

Look at that, only 3,077 miles, and just under 48 driving hours. The resulting directions are straightforward; and if you’re confused, you can just click on any one of the steps, and Google Maps presents that portion of the route for you, in either satellite view or map view.

The route display is highlighted on the map, just like you would highlight your own paper atlas when you plan for a long road trip. As shown in this map, Google Maps sticks to the major roads and highways, and attempts to identify the fastest and most direct driving route for you.  No more spending hours pouring over maps the night before a trip.  With the click of a button on your Smartphone, Google does all of the planning and routing for you.

Instant My Location Updates at the Touch of a Button

If you drive for a few hours and want to determine where you are, just open up Google Maps and press 0, or click on the little magic blue ball at the lower right corner of the displayed map. Google Maps performs its cellphone tower triangulation magic, and you’re instantly swept to the map that shows your current location. It’s like having your own personal navigator and mapping system right on your cellphone. Who needs a GPS unit now?