Apple continues down the location road
As you are hearing everywhere today (glad I could add to the noise 🙂 ) Apple, Inc has announced some interesting location features to their iLife ’09 applications. iPhoto adds geotag support (along with direct connection to flickr and Facebook) which can be used to create maps (in iPhoto) of picture locations and to create maps that you can include in the photobooks that you can create with iPhoto. This is a great application of fairly straightforward technologies. The picture locations interface really looks like it took a que from Magrathea (or whatever is it called now) and is a fairly GISy interface.
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photos from gizmodo
In iMovie they added a great little effect for folks making travel videos. You can drag and drop a map with locations chosen and iMovie will apparently create and pan and zoom effect movie clip between the locations. I promise to use this sparingly when I get hold of the software 🙂
Core Location, geotagging and maps in iLife. These are great steps by a big company. I hope they are just the tip of the location iceberg for Apple.
2 Replies to “Apple continues down the location road”
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This is a very nice idea. I think it’s brilliant for Apples marketing. But will never reach the level of Google Maps.
Can’t say that I disagree. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc have online maps covered better than Apple could ever hope to, however the shift here is bringing the map data and geotag service integration (ala flickr) to the desktop in existing popular applications. While those of us on the leading edge are comfortable living in the cloud and the bouncing between sites that often entails, we still make up a relatively small percentage of the overall computing population. Having an app that integrates with all of the great lbs web services out there is (I think) the key to Apple’s move. For them it has always been about making computing easier, fewer clicks and all that.