Review: Navigon for iPhone

I've written in the past about my poor experience with phone based navigation systems that relied on a network for the maps as well as the routing information. Last summer with iOS 4 released, a new crop of useless navigation applications appeared for the iPhone. With a trip on the horizon where I'd be renting a car, I decided to try out Navigon for iOS as it received decent reviews from users and had all the maps self contained without relying on the network. The navigation apps are all in the range of $25-$50 (or so), so I did a bit of research before plunking down $40 on Navigon's USA edition (it was on sale when I bought it).

When I first started using the app around town, the biggest difference from my Garmin 765 was the screen size. However, I soon realized this didn't matter as I just listened to the voice navigation. My Garmin became increasingly frustrating to use as the resistive touch screen wasn't very accurate and entering information was cumbersome. Navigon's interface is quite straight forward and data entry is easy. The voice prompts are clear and gave me enough notice before I had to make a turn.

Once you enter an address and start navigation, there is no need to touch the display again, except if alerts come up (which is kind of annoying, but Navigon can't do anything about notifications and battery warnings). As with all GPS apps on the iPhone, Navigon sucks the life out of the battery. If you combine this with being in an area without cell coverage, you pretty much need to plug the iPhone into a car charger. Luckily I have a 2 USB port car charger and an extra USB to dock connector cable.

California law is very specific on where you can place a GPS unit and effectively it can only be mounted in the lower left corner of a windshield (you can put it in the lower right corner, but that's pretty useless). So, you'll need to get some type of mount so that the iPhone can maintain an adequate GPS signal and you can hear the voice. Also, if you want to glance at the screen for an upcoming turn, it needs to be at eye level. However, relying on the voice navigation seems pretty adequate (and safer) to me.

Coming from the Garmin, I really only needed the GPS application to navigate me to my destination without relying on the cellular network and be easy to enter information. Navigon easily met these conditions. In my testing, I took it on a trip to an area that had no AT&T coverage for the last about 1 hour of the trip, so any GPS app that didn't have built in maps would have been a complete failure (i.e. Garmin's offering for the iPhone).

While I'm not a huge fan of the colors that Navigon used and the non-standard looking buttons, I believe they made the choices to be easy to use with one hand and be as non-distracting as possible. Of course, the app says not to use while driving, but the developers probably knew that people would ignore this, so they made it easy for people to use while driving (I don't condone this activity; rely on the voice navigation while driving).



My torture test was to use the app in an area I'd never been before and have it navigate me to my destination that was about 3 hours away. I was either going to have huge problems if it got me lost (no cell coverage for part of the trip as I said before) or it was going to deliver me safely to my destination. (OK, I had actually put Google Maps directions on my iPad in case there was a problem as I'm not a complete idiot.) The Navigon software performed flawlessly.

There are a number of GPS apps out there that probably do a similar job, so I can't say that it is any better or worse than others. I can say, however, that it is better than my Garmin and frankly better than a standalone GPS unit due to the fact that I don't have to carry an extra device and it has all my addresses in it. I packed up my Garmin and am ready to pass it on as I no longer have a use for it; I really haven't had the Garmin for that long (about 1.5 years) as I bought it after my last fiasco with phone based navigation software. My, oh my, how quickly things (and my thinking) change.

Pros

• Built in maps.
• Doesn't rely on a network connection to operate.
• Text to speech voice tells you where to turn and when.
• Active Lane Assistant makes it easy to see which lane you need to be in on a freeway for exiting/merging.
• Different options for routes based on your preferences.
• Decent list of points of interest. I was able to enter "Budget" and an option came up for Budget car rental return which is what I wanted.

Cons

• Address book integration is kind of poor. Tapping on a friend's full address sets the destination to be about 30 miles away from where it really is.
• Social networking integration is useless.
• Inconsistent use of British spelling. In one case Favorites is spelling Favourites and Optimize is spelled Optimise. For the version with USA maps, it should use American spellings.
• Black background and black buttons just don't look right to me. It looks like someone wanted to get fancy and instead made it look ugly.

Summary
Navigon USA edition does what it is supposed to do and easily replaces a standalone GPS unit. If you are going to travel in a rental car or even your own car in an unfamiliar area, the Navigon app (or one of its competitors) would definitely be worth your money to have at your disposal. The cost may seem a bit steep at $50 or $60, but compared to a standalone GPS unit that does less, it's a drop in the bucket.

The other side of daily deals

In the last few years, "daily deals" have started popping up everywhere from Groupon to my local paper's deal. From a consumer point of view, some of these are pretty good where a consumer can get a product or service for maybe 50% off. This, of course, isn't done out of altruism, but for marketing purposes in order to attract new customers.

My wife's jewelry business, Designs by Janessa, has been doing well, but she's been looking for ways to expand it and market to more people. She was approached by one of these deal sites and now has done a few of them. I'm sure many of my readers have read about coffee shops that did Groupons and lost tons of money because the deals didn't do what they had expected them to do.

While I'm not going to get into the exact specifics of how these deals work, I'm going to present some made up numbers and give people an idea of the merchant side of a deal.

The companies that present the deals have 2 goals when doing a deal. The first is to make money. If you take kind of a conservative figure (similar to Apple's App Store), the company may take 30% of what someone pays for a deal. On a $50 value for $25, the company makes $7.50. They cover the processing fee and run the website for the deal. What they bring to the table is their customer list and potential audience. The company's other goal is to build their customer list so that they can solicit other merchants to do a deal and say "we have 50,000 people on our list". So basically, the company is selling a customer list to merchants (merchants only get the list of people that buy it). Is the "list" worth say $7.50 (or more) per customer? Well, that depends.

For the merchant, they are trying to gain repeat customers and spread the word about their company or brand. They really aren't looking for the person that uses the deal and doesn't come back as the cost to acquire that customer is usually far too high. So how does a merchant do a deal and not get raked over the coals with people just looking for a bargain? That's where things get tricky.

First off, the merchant must realize that the entire cost of the deal is a marketing expense. So in my hypothetical example above, the merchant effectively is paying $32.50 for each customer that is brought in as the merchant must provide $50 worth of a product or service, but only gets paid $17.50 for it.. Ouch, that sounds pretty steep and can easily make a merchant regret doing the deal. Depending on what the merchant is offering, if a customer buys the minimum and never comes back or tells his/her friends, this is a waste. In order to reduce the cost to the merchant, the merchant should make sure that shipping and sales tax are excluded and that the minimum purchase is greater than the deal, i.e. any single product that can be purchased is greater than the deal value; in this case, $50.. This, at least, reduces the cost per customer and most customers understand that discounts don't apply to shipping and tax. If a customer purchases significantly more, then the cost to acquire the customer is a drop in the bucket and the deal was a success.

Second, the merchant needs to put words in the contract such that there is a limit to the number of offers that any one person or better yet, household (defined as the same address) can redeem. My wife had a person buy 11 of the offers which was basically 50% off. Some of the deal sites are smart enough to limit the number by credit card number and/or address.

Third, if the merchant thinks that customers are trying to game the system, the merchant should put the onus on the company putting on the promotion to either foot the bill for the dishonest people or deal with the customers. It's probably in the best interest of the company putting on the promotion to eat the cost so that they don't get a bad reputation; besides, they're making a killing for minimal work.

Fourth, limit the total number of offers. If the merchant is a small business, the influx of customers could swamp them and annoy all customers when products are delayed.

Fifth, before even undertaking a daily deal, the merchant has to ask him or herself if the marketing dollars could better be spent elsewhere. If something comes up as a deal, does the merchant actually want the customer that is cheep and looking for a deal? Also, if someone doesn't get in on a deal, he or she could be waiting for the next deal and not buy expecting a deal to come later.

Daily deals have been a boon to consumers (my wife and I have bought a few). Most people don't realize the actual cost to the merchant and some merchants may think they're losing money on a deal which is probably the wrong way to look at being part of a deal. However, before a merchant gets involved in a daily deal, he or she should carefully think of the cost, additional work involved, and the headaches of dealing with "cheap" customers (in my experience, customers that are looking for a bargain are sometimes quite troublesome and not worth keeping as customers).

Review: iMovie for iPad

For many reasons, I've been interested in video editing and making movies for years; nothing professional, I just thought it was kind of neat to be able to put together movies. Over 20 years ago, I put together footage that I had taken at the 1989 National Scout Jamboree and put together a little video that I edited using our camcorder and a VCR. I may have even put in some titling using a computer, but I can't recall. That was quite rudimentary compared to what can be done today.

When Apple first introduced iMovie for the Mac, I thought it was quite neat and made a few videos, but the more video I took and stored, the more time consuming it became to edit the videos. Since then, I've made a few movies, but have mostly left that to my mother as she seems to like doing it and does a great job throwing together random clips and photos to make something interesting.

At the iPad 2 introduction, Apple showed iMovie for iPad. The ease of use looked amazing and getting it was one of my many reasons for buying an iPad 2. After I got my iPad 2 the other day, the first app I bought was iMovie. My intention was to make a movie from videos and photos that we shot in the last year of our son. While I was hopeful that I could accomplish that this weekend, I was also realistic that based on my past history, this might have been a pipe dream.

The first step in creating a movie was to make sure all my video was in the proper format for the iPad. I already wrote about transcoding all my video the other day, so that part was accomplished. I decided to see how far I could get this weekend. In about the 1 hour or so that I could use my iPad, I managed to apply all the video I wanted to the timeline and trimmed it. I then spent maybe another hour adding photos and dropping in some songs.

I was absolutely amazed that within about 2 hours, I was able to create a 9 minute movie ready to show. In the past, the movies I've made have taken me a long time on the order of 1 hour per 1 minute of final movie which really makes the process a drag. I'm now cautiously optimistic that I can keep up the movie making if it is this easy to make something half decent.

I did encounter a few issues with iMovie including crash or two. iMovie applies the Ken Burns effect to every photo added, something that I find pretty annoying. In order to remove this, you have to set the starting and ending zoom level and picture position to be the same. This is fine as long as you zoom out on every picture and align the picture to an edge; however, if you want to zoom in or center the photo, this process is extremely hard to do. I've submitted feedback to Apple to improve this.

iMovie on the iPad is intuitive in many ways, but I read through the in-app help which reduced some of my frustration (removing the Ken Burns effect is documented). I'd strongly recommend that people read the docs before starting a project as some actions are strange at first.

iMovie for iPad is almost a killer reason to buy an iPad 2 (it won't run on a first generation iPad). However, if your video isn't in a format that the iPad can show, you have to go through the long and tedious process of converting it; if you're also shopping for a new digital camera, I'd suggest looking for one that encodes video in a format that the iPad can show natively (also useful to import video when you're away from your computer). So far, my brief research shows that the Panasonic compact digital cameras use M-JPEG which the iPad should be able to read.

Pros

• Intuitive interface for most editing needs.
• Extremely fast method for creating movies.
• Decent results with little effort.

Cons

• Removing Ken Burns effect is a pain when adding photos.
• No ability to lower volume of music in particular parts of a clip, i.e. no fine grained audio editing. iMovie will "duck" the audio in the background music if there is music in a clip.
• It can be slow at times where the interface appears to be unresponsive.
• Occasional crashes.

Summary
If you have an iPad 2, spend the $4.99 and buy iMovie. Even if you don't make a lot of movies, just playing with it is worth it to see what the iPad 2 can do. This could be the way to edit movies at the end of a trip even before you get home as it is easy to put off the movie making and simply never get around to it.

iMovie is an impressive piece of software and I hope that Apple keeps making minor improvements to touch up the edges.

Video Transcoding for the iPad

When I first started syncing pictures to my iPad, I noticed that videos didn't sync. After some research, it turns out that the video/audio format used by my Canon SD960 IS, I kind of put it on the back burner and ignored it. Now that I have an iPad 2, I bought iMovie and wanted to do a little video editing this weekend. Unfortunately the only clips that I had on my iPad were taken with my iPhone 4.

After a bit of futzing around with AppleScript, I slapped together 2 scripts to transcode my videos into 720 p and suitable for use on my iPad. The big issues I found is that QuickTime Player (the one with Snow Leopard) changed the AppleScript syntax and exports asynchronously. For non-techies, this means that the export basically happens in the background. This created a problem as I don't know when each export ends; I need this information so that I can change the date on the exported file to match the original file as well only running around 10 exports going at once (too many running basically slows down the system).

So here's what I did:

1. Created a new folder on the Desktop called Movies and dragged all my movies from iPhoto.
2. Created a second folder on the Desktop called NewMovies.
3. Opened AppleScript Editor and used the following script and saved it as an application.

   property exportFolder : (path to desktop folder as Unicode text) & "NewMovies:"