Goal"Tech" Technology: Apps on the trail

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mjirving
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Joined: July 5th, 2011, 10:40 am

Goal"Tech" Technology: Apps on the trail

Post by mjirving » November 21st, 2015, 8:28 am

This post will be focused on the apps that I use on my iPhone while I hike on the trail.  More power to those of you who like to avoid technology on the trail, I think that's great.  For those of you who enjoy a little tech on the trail, you may be interested in what I use, so here goes.

Navigation:

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If I could only take one app on the trail it'd be Gaia GPS.  This to me is the gold standard for GPS apps on the trail.  I download the area of interest around my route before the hike over wifi so that I have all the maps on my phone for use when I don't have cell coverage on the trail which is most of the time.  If capacity on your phone is limited, you can download the maps in lower resolution which is s a nice option.  I never have a problem establishing a GPS lock to see where I'm at and to plot my way.  I also download the GPS track for my hike and import to Gaia so that I can see my route on the map.  I get these tracks from others, GPSFly.org, or from http://www.pctmap.net for the Pacific Crest Trail.  Other things I like about Gaia is that it tells me how far I've gone, my elevation, my elevation gain/loss, average speed, pace and my altitude profile.  I like the average pace per hour as that's what I use to make sure I'm maintaining a reasonable pace throughout the day with my stopping to socialize with other hikers or taking breaks and pictures.  I like to average 2.0 mph for the day including all breaks.  I don't stress about it, but it's a nice gauge to see how I'm doing.  I also love the integration with the Apple Watch so that all this data is available at the glance of my wrist.  I have the "pro" version which allows for customized waypoint icons which is nice to mark for return trips for the best campsites and water locations.  Also in the pro version it allows for downloading multiple map types and then blending them together into one.  My favorite is the topo map overlaid with the "shade" layer so that the contours and elevations really pop.

Price: $20 and the pro version is $40 per year in addition to that, so it's a little pricey, but worth it.  With all the free maps and not having to pay for and carry a separate GPS unit, makes it a real gem.
Apple Watch companion app included

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Topo Maps is my back-up map app.  This too provides free maps to download which can be downloaded by quads for the area of interest for your hike.  There are 2 features on Topo Maps that make it the extra app for me.  They are the radius feature that puts rings around your location to show mile increments to all the areas around you on the map.  The second feature the one that shades everything on the map that you shouldn't be able to see from your viewing angle in brown.  The remaining clear parts of the map include everything you should be able to see.  This comes in handy if you're high-up and trying to spot a lake and you can't figure out why you can't find it.  You can check this app to see if you can even see it based on your viewing angle.

Price: $8

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Earthmate is the companion app for my DeLorme inReach SE satellite communicator.  I don't use the maps on it much, but I do use the texting part of it to stay in contact with my family at home and my family that is my support group on my long section hikes.  While I don't use it much, it's great to have that option when needed.  Last year my son was in a fender bender when I was out of range for 5 days and it was nice to be able to support my wife through the navigation of dealing with that and knowing that my son was fine.  I also really like the ability to send an e-mail to [email protected] which then will automatically return a weather forecast to me almost immediately for the area that my GPS signal is located.  This is a huge benefit.

Price: Free (but requires a DeLorme inReach device to be a companion with it.)

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Halfmile should be in the mythical PCT hall of fame.  I came across him last year on the PCT and told him this.  I had also had a question about the app the night before, so when I met him I got some free troubleshooting on the trail!  This app specifically for the Pacific Crest Trail tells me within 1/100th of a mile, where I am on the PCT and how far everything to the north and south of me is from that exact location.  If I get off-trail by accident and need to find my way back it tells me the direction to go and how far I need to bushwhack to get back to the trail.  It really is brilliant.

Price: Free

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Guthook is my secondary app for the PCT.  It comes in 5 sections including Washington, Oregon, Northern California, The Sierra, and Southern California.  I like the elevation profile on Guthook and how it shows your GPS location along that profile.  I also use Guthook as my primary water report tool as it shows where the water locations are along the PCT and allows for a social media component so the users can update all the water flow information which is very helpful on the dry trail.

Price: $5 per section

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Peak.ar is an app that's not available in the app store anymore, but there are others like it.  It allows me to hold up my phone to the horizon and see the mountains in the area as if I were to take a picture.  Only instead of taking a picture it puts a little digital cap on each peak in the the live image and identifies its name and elevation.  It uses the GPS and compass to figure this out and its a pretty amazing app.

Price: Not Available

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I use iBooks to keep the PDFs of my annotated maps for the trail most notably the PCT.  I keep paper copies of the maps too just in case, but I find it much easier to use the phone to be able to move around and zoom with ease rather than managing folded papers and keeping them in the right sequence.

Price: Free native Apple app

Cameras:

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My go-to camera app is actually the native Apple camera app.  I like the ability to flick it open from the locked home screen. I also use the "pano" option a lot on the trail to better capture the expansive spaces out in the wilderness.  I use it for video when appropriate too.  I particularly like the capability to shoot video at 240 frames per second.  It is an incredible way to get super slow motion video that is amazingly precise and crisp of butterflies, bees on flowers and other fast moving creatures to see them in super slow motion.  I also like the companion Apple Watch app that allows me to control the picture with a remote shutter from my watch.

Price: Free native Apple app
Apple Watch companion app included

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Pro HDR X is an app I love for pictures.  It is fantastic for high contrast outdoor pictures where there are dark shadows and bright sun.  Typically these pictures require either a washed out sky or a black shade area.  This app takes two pictures at different exposures and then combines them into one.  It does a much better job than the standard HDR app on the iPhone.  The tradeoff is that the camera must be held completely still as the two pictures have to be perfectly aligned.  I sometimes will cheat and prop the phone on a rock or tree when I take the picture, but I try to use the ultralight tripod I keep in my pocket (Gorillapod $18) with a spring-loaded tripod mount holder (Case Star from Amazon for $5.00) These are super fast to set up and use at a moment's notice.

Price: $2

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I carry a GoPro Hero 3+ Black Edition camera with me too for some of the more unique shots that are hard to achieve with a regular phone camera. I shoot some video too such as raging creek crossings, sketchy log crossings or other exposure where I don't want to hold a camera.  It's also fun for underwater and other crazy weather situations.  I really like the wifi integration as the camera has its own wifi hotspot that my iPhone can connect to for downloading pictures from the GoPro to my phone so that I can use them in my daily blogs.  (Video can't be transferred due to it being so gigantic in size to transfer) The wifi connection also enables me to use my phone as the viewfinder and a remote trigger for the shutter.

Price: Free (but requires a GoPro camera)

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SlowShutter is used to take exposure shots.  I use it mostly for waterfall pictures.  It's not the best as the algorithm for processing these pictures isn't the best so you have to play around with the settings a bit, but I use it every now and then.  I've also used it for time exposure shots for light painting with my headlamp in the dark.

Price: $1

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360 is a fun app to take 360-degree pictures including above and below you to make it actually a spherical picture.  The app automatically snaps images as the camera is moved around to fill-in the sphere.  It stitches it all together to make the final image.  It requires viewing in a special viewer that is automatically used with the link generated when sharing the picture.  I don't use it a lot, but it's kind of fun.  Summit pictures are my most common use for it.

Price: $2

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Tadaa SLR is an app that gives you SLR-like settings for for your iPhone.  I haven't used it a ton, but I should as it has a lot of cool settings.

Price: $4

Photo Editing:

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I use the native Photos app to crop and do basic tuning of my pictures each night on the trail.  I find it a great way to reflect on the day and to get all the editing and deleting of extra pictures done in the moment so it's not a big task after the fact at home.  I also use them in my daily blog.

Price: Free native Apple app
Apple Watch companion app included

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Diptic is great for creating photo montages with multiple pictures integrated into one picture.  Particularly nice for comparing two separate pictures so that can be viewed simultaneously.

Price: $1

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Pixelmator is my primary app for heavy editing for special effects or heavy editing changes to an image.  One of my favorite tools in this app is the retouch option to burning or dodging areas in a photo (selectively making only certain parts of a photo darker or lighter without changing the entire photo together.)

Price: $5

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Reduce is a nice tool to reduce the file size of your photos.  On the trail it is often that the cell service is poor at best.  This app can be used to create a smaller file size version of your pictures to send them more easily over weak signals.

Price: $2

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Skitch is a great app to annotate pictures.  I use the arrows to point out specific parts of a picture that I I want to highlight and I also use it to put text labelling in a picture if needed for something special.

Price: Free

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Title Fx is a new app for me that is for titling pictures.  This has a lot of nicer and more interesting fonts and styles than sketch for more fancier labeling of pictures.

Price: $2

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Color Splash is an app that allows you to make a picture black & white and then selectively return the original color in one part of the picture.  I used it at Crater Lake to have a black & white with only the water of the lake in blue.  It's a novelty app that's fun, but I use it selectively.

Price: $1

Astronomy:

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MoonCalendar is a handy app that is new for me that I've started to use more in the planning for my hikes.  It allows me to see what the moon phase will be, the moon rise and set and the part of the sky it will be in and how high it will rise on any day of the year in any location on the map.  It's just kind of nice to know how lit up your night will be (or won't be).

Price: $2

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Sunrise & Set, like the moon app is very handy for planning hikes.  It tells me the obviously the sunrise and sunset times for any location on any day of the year.  You can pick by city, but what's also nice is the ability to pick by GPS coordinate since trails aren't really by any of the prominent cities listed.  I also like the fact that it tells me when civil twilight is each day (dawn and dusk, when you can just barely see your way without added light).  I often like to start my hiking at civil twilight in the morning and on the flip side, like to have my camp fully set up and dinner finished by civil twilight in the evening.

Price: Free "lite" version or $2 pro version

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Star Walk is a fun app for pointing your viewfinder in the sky and the app will overlay the constellation names and shapes over the live image to identify the night sky.  It also says where things like the international space station are and the planets.  It also informs of any special activity like meteor showers, etc.

Price: $3
Apple Watch companion app included

Weather:

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If I have a connection, I use Dark Sky for my weather, but more importantly for the rain forecast by minute as it will forecast the exact time that rain will start and stop which is nice. Also for weather, when I don't have cell service, I will use my DeLorme inReach SE to sent a satellite message to [email protected] which will send me a weather forecast message right back to my DeLorme device for the GPS location that I sent it from.

Price: $4
Apple Watch companion app included

Journaling:

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The Notes native app is what I use for my journaling.  I used to use a hand-written journal, but it's actually way easier to journal directly on my phone when lying in bed than it is to write with a pen on paper as I have the ability to do it in mid-air instead of on a hard surface for writing.  I also plan to convert my blog to a book for the Pacific Crest Trail, so I'll still have a permanent hard copy of my travels.  The other tip I have for this is that I take little reminder notes throughout the day so that I remember the proper sequence and details.  Then I convert those very short words and notes into a narrative at night...another nice way to reflect back on the day. I like to use Notes first as I never have to worry about a 3rd party app crashing and losing all my work.  I simply copy and paste it when I'm done into my blogging app.

Price: Free native Apple app

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BlogTouch Pro is my go-to app for blogging.  After I write my journal in Notes, I paste it into here.  I use Blogger and the Blogger app is horrible.  Another horrible app is BlogPress.  Don't get near either one of those apps...crashing...terrible U.I., etc.  This app on the other hand is much better.  It still takes some time though (e.g., pictures have to be brought in one at a time), but its pretty good and never crashes, even on big posts.  I find that it requires 2 bars of LTE to successfully post a picture laden blog post (which surprisingly I often get at least once a day on the PCT)

Price: $5

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AudioMemos is an app I use to capture sounds on the trail or to capture little interview snippets from people about a part of their adventure or their favorite thing for the day.  I create movies from my major hikes using Apple's Final Cut Pro X on my Mac, so I'll import sounds from AudioMemos to overlay onto the audio track for some portions of the movies that I make.

Price: Free native Apple app

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Activity app is what captures all my health related data during the day.  The primary thing that I use it for is to capture my numbers of steps that I take during the day as I like to log that in my data statistics for each day out of curiosity.

Price: Free native Apple app (requires I think at least an Apple iPhone 5S to capture steps)
Apple Watch companion app included

Safety:

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Wilderness First Aid App is what I keep on my phone for instruction on what to do with any wilderness injury that might occur.  I'm not suggesting that this replaces the need for proper training, but I figure it's better than nothing and saves me the weight of taking a paper version.  The only thing I've used it for to date is to remind myself about proper lightning safety techniques when entering a lightning storm.

Price: $1

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US Fires is a great app to stay on top of the forest fire situation when on-trail which is a regular occurrence when hiking the PCT and many other trails in the summer.  It shows fire locations and names on the map color coded by intensity.  Tapping on a fire takes you to all the information about the state of the fire and its impact.  I use this to determine where smoke on the trail is coming from and fire dodging strategies.  On a smokey day on the PCT last year I was able to assure people that the fire was about 60 miles away when they were concerned they might be walking right into it.  The season before I used this app to determine a plan B strategy to get around the 790 Fire which was on my planned route south of Crater Lake. I had my plan fully in place to execute before I even got to the fire closure.

Price: Free for one state and $1 for each additional state with all states being free after the first 5 I think, or something like that.

Flora & Fauna:

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OR Flowers is a nice app if you're interested in identifying the local flowers and plants.  It's a very large app at about 350 megabytes, but that's not too bad considering it has multiple pictures of every flower listed which are a lot.  It can be a little tricky finding the flower you're looking at; I find it best to use as few identifying characteristics as possible to whittle down your search so that you don't go too far and accidentally rule out the flower from the list by doing something like misinterpreting the color as pink rather than purple or something like that. The "OR" is for Oregon.  There are similar apps by the same developer for other states.

Price: $10

Summary:

What apps do you like?  Are there ones that I should add or change?  I'd like to have a good bird identification app that also includes their sounds.  I'd like to have an app that could identify flowers and/or trees just by looking at their live image or a picture of them.  There is one called SnapSeed, but I think it's only for the east coast.  Let me know what apps I should try!

-GoalTech
http://www.GoalTechHikes.com

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jdemott
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Joined: July 23rd, 2010, 1:43 pm
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Re: Goal"Tech" Technology: Apps on the trail

Post by jdemott » November 21st, 2015, 9:54 am

Nice summary. There are several apps there that I didn't know about. I agree that Gaia seems like the clear winner in the GPS category; and I agree that the Apple native camera and photo apps are the best go-to options for photography. I have several third party photo apps but I seldom use them any more.

Here are a few apps I use that weren't mentioned:

Light Trac -- This does many of the same things you describe for the sun and moon apps. Light Trac will show both sun and moon info for any location and time, including the direction and elevation of both sun and moon, superimposed on a map. Nice for planning photography.

Peak Finder -- This provides a sketch of all surrounding peaks, with names. Sounds like Peak.ar might be better if it superimposes the info over a screen shot.

Audubon Pacific Northwest Field Guide -- Takes up a lot of memory, but it provides a really nice guide to birds, trees, mammals, insects, flowers, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies, and fish with nice photos, audio bird calls, etc. Obviously not as comprehensive for any category as a guide devoted just to wildflowers, for example, but a nice single source reference tool. My wife has Oregon Wildflowers and Washington Wildflowers on her phone.

I don't do any photo editing on the phone (other than deleting). The screen is just too small for me. Snapseed is a great editing app for the iPad and I think it is available for the iPhone as well. I use Google Photos to store all my photos in the cloud and Photo Transfer to easily transfer files between devices, but those are both for use when I have access to WiFi.

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mjirving
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Joined: July 5th, 2011, 10:40 am

Re: Goal"Tech" Technology: Apps on the trail

Post by mjirving » November 21st, 2015, 9:55 pm

Thanks John!

Light Trac looks pretty interesting. I had seen one like this before but it was quite expensive and not something I was sure I'd use that much but it would be a fun one to have I think. Is that Audubon one you mentioned an Apple app? Can you double check the name as I see several that are similar, but not that exact one.

Thanks!
Mike

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jdemott
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Re: Goal"Tech" Technology: Apps on the trail

Post by jdemott » November 22nd, 2015, 9:11 am

I just checked on the App Store and it looks like the Pacific Northwest Field Guide is no longer offered. The app I have, which I bought some time ago and works fine on my iPhone 6s, is from the National Audubon Society, with sections for various flora and fauna in the Northwest. I recall there were other regional guides offered when I bought mine, but it seems the National Audubon Society now offers a series of separate national guides for birds, mammals, etc., but not a regional app. I imagine if you bought them all you'd have a pretty comprehensive guide, but it would take a lot of storage space. Sorry if I gave you misdirection.

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mjirving
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Re: Goal"Tech" Technology: Apps on the trail

Post by mjirving » November 22nd, 2015, 10:26 am

Thanks John, I'm checking them out. Too bad they don't have the regional one as that's obviously where I spend most of my time. I've got a 128 gig phone though so I may just go for it as this is an area I've been meaning to study more to enhance my hikes.

Thanks!

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