Thursday, June 12, 2008

GPS Aware Software

I see that a lot of iPhone 2.0 apps will make use of the GPS chip and be geo-aware. The simplest example is geotagging photos but OmniFocus (a todo list app) will make use of location to show what you to do next. As GPS chips drop below $3.50 I wonder how long until laptops will have them?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it's likely you'll see GPS chips in future Macs, but I think it's a certainty that you'll see CoreLocation in desktop OSX. Whether it's using GPS or just the Wifi Geolocation the iPhone and Touch have now...

In addition, I'd be amazed if the iPhone 3G didn't also act as a "sniffer" for that Wifi Geoloc system that reports what wifi APs are visible at your current location occasionally. This would cause the accuracy of that geoloc to increase dramatically in wifi-dense areas.

Howard said...

I figured for desktops, entering your location in the same way you enter your timezone is perfectly reasonable. I'm not sure how I feel about having my wifi network's location published. I agree on the sniffer idea, as long as they're aren't dumb and affect battery life.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I didn't mean desktop machines would have GPS chips, I just meant the desktop version of OSX would include the CoreLocation API.

Howard said...

Yeah I know, I just offered "enter it once" in addition to GPS and wifi geoloc.