Sat Nav For Your Bike (If You Have An iPhone)
I love this. It’s a sat nav that thinks like someone on a bike. It knows pretty much all the local shortcuts, which way to go when you’re in a hurry (but don’t want to pedal up hills if you can help it), which way to go when you’re really in a hurry (hills be damned!), and all about stuff like the National Cycle Network.
And it’s FREE.
This isn’t an app that’ll track your cadence, heart rate, total elevation gain or mileage. Nope - it does something much more useful than that:
It tells you how to get from A to B. Like - from home to work. Or to the shops. Or the pub. Or even (heaven forbid) to the gym.
But it does it in a particularly bike-friendly way.
So you get to pick which kind of route you want - quietest (most traffic free), quickest (most direct, but avoiding nasty hills if possible), fastest (most direct, and hills be damned!), or balanced (a sensible mix of the others).
The beauty of this is that you get to find new routes to all your favourite places - In trying it out over the last few days, I’ve found routes just a couple of streets parallel to my OMG-I’m-so-late-and-so-in-trouble routes . . . but with hardly any cars. I’ve found routes that add on a couple of minutes to my journey times, but completely avoid messy town centres and a couple of hills along the way.
It’s not perfect (yet), but if I were trying to persuade a colleague to start riding to work on the bike they bought under the cycle to work scheme, THIS is the app I’d use to convince them.
In addition to finding routes for you, it also does other useful things - it knows the location of pretty much every bike shop in the country, and can easily tell you where the nearest ones are. It knows what bike events are on, and can show you where. And it has a whole stack of other useful information hidden under the "more" tab - stuff like the cycle to work scheme, where you can ride off-road, cycling and the law, and some nice quotes about cycling to reassure you you’re in good company.
Things I’d like to see added . . .
- Easy toggling between the various route options - at the moment you have to re-enter the ‘from’ and ‘to’ locations
- Saving favourite places - it’d be good to be able to type "Home" into the to location! Oh, and it’s not very good at recognizing post codes - it likes "HA1 4NE", but not "ha1 4ne"
- A drop-pin function for when you don’t know the name of the place you’re trying to get to!
But I’m nit-picking. Like I said at the top - I love this app, and so should you. Go and download it now!
Workout:
- Type: Cycle
- Date: 09/20/2010
- Time: 18:25:31
- Total Time: 00:30:00.00
- Calories: 146
- Distance: 5 miles
- Average Speed: 10 mph
Is it easy to attched the iPhone to the handlebars ?