Posted 08/30/09 at 09:21:16 PM by Justin Kerr

 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.

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Posted 08/17/09 at 07:54:28 PM by Paul Lilly

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.

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Posted 06/05/09 at 03:36:36 PM by Paul Lilly

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.

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Posted 02/14/08 at 08:05:31 PM by Will Smith

Will Smith takes a quick look at the first of many questionable interface designs - Wordpress' page nav links

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