iPhone GPS location tracking for live blog

[adlib13]

Hello all. This is my first post on the macrumors forums, so hopefully it's in the right place! If not, I apologize. Now, to my question:

I am interested in creating a travel blog that has some way of letting my readers know where I am from GPS / location data. I'm thinking something along the lines of a little widget on my blog's sidebar that is a map with pinpoints or a trail of all the locations I've been. This location data would be coming from my iPhone 4, and would ideally be automatically updating so people can see in real time exactly where I am.

I'm not worried about the privacy aspect of this, as it is a private blog for just my friends and family. And, ideally, I'd be able to turn off the tracking for any mysterious top-secret escapades I might choose to embark on. Either way, I think that this would be a very cool/funky/web2.0/interesting feature to my blog.

Anyway, do you know of a website or web app or application or service that tracks my phone in real time and makes it easy to share this with others? Bonus points if the service even offers location history and shows a path or a trail of my adventure. Oh and I guess it doesn't have to be "live" or "real time," but the closer the better. If I have to settle for hourly or daily updates, I will.

I don't have mobileme, so I'm not sure if the Find My iPhone feature is just for emergencies or if it works all the time or if it's easily sharable with others (don't want them to have to log in to a service or anything cumbersome like that).

I have looked into Google Latitude but it seems like you can currently only update your location by navigating your iPhone's Safari browser to their site and loading the page, which is not nearly as autonomous as I'd hope. I do like latitude, though, because they have a little "Location Badge" that I can easily integrate with my blog, so maybe if I could find some way to automate the location updating process (like Automator, but for the iPhone?).

With OS 4.0 and multitasking and iPhone awesomeness, I don't think this is too difficult of a request. I just hope that "there's an app for that"

Thanks!

 

[Tom G.]

I would recommend that you go to the app store and look for what you need. There are currently 3,825 apps in the Navigation section so the chances are that you should be able to find what you want.

A quick scan of only the first 2 pages brought up one that may work called

"GPSme"

There are bound to be others.

Have fun.

Edit: Mobile Me is not just for emergencies. It was designed to find your iPhone or iPad etc. I used mine the other day because I knew that my iPhone was in my house but I couldn't find it. I had a voice mail problem that was preventing me from simply calling it, so I used Mobile Me -- Find My Phone to cause it to ring. It was under a sheet of paper on my desk.

 

[broncopde]

Wirelessly posted (iPod touch: Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

I believe applications like this will be emerging soon as one of the multitasking features Apple has included is that location apps can constantly be running in the background to update location without you having to open them each time. So maybe Loopt or a service like that will upgrade soon to support this.

 

[kmcrawford]

Check out Bread Krumb on iTunes.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=377330618&mt=8

 

[livingonvideo13]

One that I have used and it is free is at

http://www.instamapper.com/

I went on a Motorcycle trip and used this to update those back home exactly where we were and what speed we were traveling. Works really well. Since it was an app though on the iPhone, you can to be running it and so you could not do other things on your phone while it was running. I Jailbroke my iPhone so I could run it in the background and also have my GPS navagation running at the same time. Worked great but it is a huge battery drain but I alway had it plugged in on my motorcycle so that was not a problem.

Hopefully they make it a multitasking app soon so it will run in the background but I am sure it will still be a big battery drainer since using the GPS constantly sucks the battery.

One thing I really wanted to do but could not find an app yet, is one that would take a photo every minute automatically and upload to a web site. Would be cool if people could see where you were and what you view was.

 

[dffdce]

A simple little app called SendLocation along with the Google maps API are two very useful building blocks if you choose to roll your own.