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GPS Systems With Real-time Traffic Can Save Drivers up to Four Days per Year

Justin Kerr — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:21:16 -0500

Any old GPS will save you time, but if you’re like me and are still clinging to an older model that doesn’t have real-time traffic data, you could be missing out. According to a new study conducted by NuStats, drivers who use real-time traffic enabled GPS’s save approximately four days per year in travel time vs. those who use nothing at all. The savings work out to an average of 18 percent per trip, and also yielded a CO2 savings of nearly 21 percent.

Participants in the study were broken down into three categories, drivers with no electronic navigation assistance, drivers with a GPS, and drivers who were using real-time traffic enabled devices. The survey participants made more than 2,100 individual trips, across approximately 20,000 kilometers of road.

These results sound great on paper, but it’s worth noting that even though the study itself was conducted by NuStats, the project was funded by NAVTEQ, a leading provider of real-time traffic data for GPS manufacturers such as Garmin. Does this shoot holes in the credibility of the study? Let us know what you think.

Tom Tom Navigation App for iPhone Released

Paul Lilly — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:54:28 -0500

Apple iPhone users living in the U.S. and Canada now have another navigation application to choose from. The app was first demonstrated at WWDC in June and is now available for download.

The $100 app uses iPhone's built-in GPS chip to give users turn-by-turn directions and is compatible with both the iPhone 3G and 3GS running the iPhone 3.0 OS or later.

"With Tom Tom for iPhone, millions of iPhone users can now benefit from the same easy-to-use and intuitive interface, turn-by-turn spoken navigation, and unique routing technology that our 30 million portable navigation devices users rely on every day," said Corinee Vigreux, Managing Director of Tom Tom.

Other features include IQ Routes, which the company claims helps drivers reach their destinations up to 35 percent faster, landscape and portrait navigation views, night and day color mode, multitouch gestures, and navigation to contacts in your address book.

A version compatible with the iPod and other iPhone models is said to also be in the works.

Google Updates Street View with New Navigation Methods

Paul Lilly — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:36:36 -0500

Navigating with Google's Street View just got a whole lot easier, and it's all thanks to the double-click. Rather than being limited to using the forward and back arrows, you can now double-click on a new place or object and warp-speed your way to that location.

"As you move your mouse within Street View, you'll notice that the cursor now has a lightly-shaded geometry attached to it - it will show an oval when your mouse is following a road and a rectangle when moving across the facade of buildings," Google wrote in a blog entry. "We affectionately refer to this cursor geometry as the 'pancake' because it has the appearance of a pancake laying flat to the object where the mouse is pointing."

Google says its pancake method gives users a sense of depth in an otherwise flat image, and we found that to be the case while playing with the new controls. The new method works well, not only for quick long-distance jumps, but also for auto-rotating the camera view if you, say, click on the front door of a house while looking down the road.

Baffling User Interface Designs - Episode 1

Will Smith — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:05:31 -0600

Since the dawn of the graphical user interface, we--the long-suffering users--have been plagued by interface design that's not fundamentally bad, it just doesn't make much sense. The problem is that once these goofy UI designs become accepted, we're stuck with them forever (just look at the stylus-required Windows Mobile UI design, if you don't believe me). If I can keep finding baffling UI designs, then this will become a regular feature of the site. If you'd like to submit your own baffling user interface design topic, send an email to will at maximumpc dot com.

Wordpress "previous/next page" links

I want to say up front that I love Wordpress. I even run it on my own neglected blog. For the most part, it's extremely well constructed, infinitely flexible, and an all around good bit of blogging software. But, I have a problem with it. Go to a Wordpress blog and scroll to the bottom of the page. Odds are that you'll see a little link there labeled "Next". Here's a picture:

That seems straightforward enough, right? Click to the next page, and go to the bottom again. Now, you're faced with this:

Now, if I want to see the next oldest page of blog posts, I'm not sure exactly which link to click. Because previous is on the left, and next is on the right, part of me wants to click "next". However, the posts I want to read are actually the previous ones in the chain, since most blogs are ordered with the newest posts at the top of the page. The people who really get screwed are the ones who start on one of the middle pages, and have to figure out the next/previous paradigm without the benefit of a browser history.

The other big problem is that this inanity is spreading. The blog the screenshots are from isn't actually a Wordpress blog, it's powered by tumblr. Now, the good folks at Wordpress have attempted to fix this problem, but the fix isn't spreading as fast as the goofy UI. The default option now looks like this:

The good news is that the fix is quite easy. All that needs to be done to fix the problem is to change the point of reference from the pages, which is confusing and open to multiple interpretations, to time. Older Posts and Newer Posts leave no room for confusion and no room for misinterpretation.