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February 13, 2006
Get Driving Direction from Your iPod
Do you use Yahoo to find driving direction? Do you own iPod Photo (or later)? If you answered “Yes” to both questions, you are a prime candidate for a useful service: iPod iWay (IPIW).
How does it work? At the iPodiWay site, submit your starting point and destination, IPIW will return you a .zip file with a series of .gif images (001.gif, 002.gif, and so on), each contains one or more instruction. All you have to do is to copy these images to synchronize with your iPod. At driving time, just view those images in sequence and follow the instruction.
You might wonder, “Why images? Why not text?” The answer is simple: the .GIF images allows for larger font, which is helpful when you are driving. Besides, the .GIF format does not take up that much space. The direction from my home to the airport 30 mile away only takes up 104KB of disk space–puny.
What not to like about it? Instead of just print out the direction on paper, you have to synchronize the images with iPod–not an easy job for some users. Also, when driving, operating the iPod to read the instruction is much harder than just picking up the paper and read.
Despite the shortcoming above, I think iPodiWay is an excellent service that increase the usefulness of your iPod.
Links:
- iPodiWay web site
- Review from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
- Review from infopackets
- You can Google “iPodiWay review” for more information
Ning.com Social Application
I picked up somewhere that Ning is a hot place for creating online social applications so I checked the site out. After a couple of visits, I concluded that Ning is not that practical.
The idea behind Ning is online applications that users can use and contribute to it. For example, Ning has a Bookshelf application which allows users to review books that they read, or mention books that they want to read. Users can also add their own reviews to other people’s books. If you like the idea, but want to use that application for something else such as movie review, just clone it. I have not actually cloned any app, but it seems straight forward.
The problem with Ning lies in the fact that it only has a handful of core applications we can clone from. That means if none of those applications fit your need, you are out of luck, unless you can create your application from scratch.
The second problem with Ning is the applications are single-minded. What do I mean by that? Let’s look at Yahoo! Group (YG) for example. YG offers its users many features such as discussion, photo album, file depository, database, poll, calendar, … These features make up a comprehensive online community. A Ning application just do one thing, and it does not do it well enough to stand out.
In conclusion, after playing around with Ning for a few days, I do not see any value Ning can offer me. Keep in mind that this is my own opinion, there are plenty people who will beg to differ. If you are curious about Ning, give it a try. It might fit your needs or it might not.
Links:
- Ning
- Review and follow-up from TechCrunch
- The Long Tail–another site that talks about Ning
- Don’t forget to Google “Ning Review” for more information.
