When I installed version 10 of the Flash Player on my macbook pro everything seemed to work ok. I use WordPress and at the time v10 of flash broke the multi-upload feature. Because of this I decided to back off to v9. All seemed well except that I noticed that some flash based sites didn’t view at all. I assumed that it was because they were published for flash 10. Later on I gave in and installed the v10 player again. I noticed that some sites still didn’t work. I knew the problem wasn’t the plugin itself because everything worked fine in Safari. Finally I trashed Firefox and reinstalled it. This didn’t seem to help. I figured there were probably some config files left behind so I trashed it again after enabling AppTrap. This allowed me to trash all config and support files for Firefox at the same time that I trashed the application itself. I then reinstalled and everything has been working every since then. I hope you find this post helpful if you run into the same problem.
GPS – Garmin VS iPhone 3G
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We were gifted a Garmin GPS for Christmas this year. It’s quite nice. Here are a few short notes about it in comparison with the GPS of the iPhone 3G…
Accuracy
The Garmin GPS unit has greater accuracy than the iPhone by about 5 feet from what I can tell. That’s not too big of a deal but the other noticeable thing was that it updates significantly faster that the iPhone GPS. It has no problem locating you while you are on the move, even at highway speeds. This is my biggest complaint with the iPhone GPS which I wrote about previously. I imagine this is because the Garmin unit provides more power to it’s GPS chip.
Connectivity
The Garmin doesn’t require internet connection for the maps. They are already on the device. This is good and bad. It’s good because it doesn’t matter if you are in range of a cell phone tower. You can still view the maps. It’s bad because you only get what’s on the device and it will eventually get outdated. Garmin charges for the map updates so that’s a big bummer. In contrast, the iPhone is always up to date and you’ll never pay for the maps since they are pulled from google.
Usability/Interactivity
The user experience on the Garmin is designed to be very simple but it uses some out-of-the-ordinary conventions. The biggest issue I have experienced is the data entry. The keyboard layout is a big alphabetic block. It’s very different from a traditional keyboard. I find it clunky because it is so much different than the qwerty keyboards that I’m used to on other mobile devices. The iPhone keyboard is smooth and natural. It’s offers a much faster method for data entry.
The Garmin defaults to a 3D view of your car on the road. It speaks to you and tells you when you are about to come up on a turn. It also automatically recalculates directions if you miss a turn. The iPhone follows you but if you miss a turn it doesn’t take any corrective action.
Conclusion
The the Garmin is built specifically as a navigation device and it performs it’s primary functions very well. It appears that the GPS features were kind of an after thought on the iPhone. It’s level of design is not up to par with other Apple products I’ve used. If you are looking for a GPS unit, don’t expect the iPhone to compare with the Garmin devices out there… at least, not yet. The beauty of the iPhone however, is that it recieves free periodic updates that improve features and user experience.
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GPS Quality and Tips on the iPhone 3G
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I’ve been in Oregon and Washington for about a week on hiking trails and lakes. I’ve been using the GPS on my iPhone as much as possible. I have read that the GPS uses cell phone towers as well as satellites to triangulate your position. It’s been a true test of the quality of the GPS chip because most of the time while on trails I haven’t had a cell phone signal. I’ve discovered a few things about the iPhone maps application and the GPS quality.
Pre-cache Map Tiles
The maps app will cache map tiles for areas that you visit while you have a data connection. When you are out of range the map will still be displayed. I imagine that there is a limit to how much storage the maps application can use for cached tiles. If you plan on taking advantage of cached map tiles you may want to consider viewing maps at more than one zoom level. I’ve discovered that one close up view and one far away view will usually suffice.
Latitude and Longitude
What if you know the coordinates of a location you wish to get to but you don’t know the path or you can’t find it on the map? We wanted to locate a few waterfalls on the map before visiting so that the maps would be cached. You can enter the latitude and longitude coordinates into the maps application to look up the location on the iPhone. An example would be “48.1188 N, 123.4278 W” (the Red Lion in Port Angeles, WA).
GPS Locator Depends on Speed
I discovered that it is usually unable to locate me when I’m traveling faster than about 5 MPH. While I can understand why this might be, it is still a real pain to have to stop the car just so that the GPS can find me on the map. Once it has initially located me it has no problem following me at 70 MPH. Seems inconsistent to me.
Altitude
The free application TrackThing available on the app store has been really cool as it has been able to provide fairly accurate latitude, longitude and altitude. It also graphs this information over time.
Thoughts
If you were planning on buying the iPhone 3G for the GPS functionality you might be better looking at a traditional GPS unit. While it’s really nice to have the GPS built in to your phone/camera/entertainment device, there has really only been one time this entire week when it was able to find us that was really helpful. It was cool to look up our altitude when we were sitting on top of Hurricane Ridge though.