App review: Map routes with your finger using Footpath
The Footpath app makes it easy for you to plan a route for walking, running, biking or driving, and then follow turn-by-turn directions when you’re out and about. I’ve been using the app several times a month for a few years while taking the dog out for her daily 3.2-mile walk. Footpath helps me vary my route and lets me explore the streets of my neighborhood.
I have plenty of useful iPhone apps. Footpath is the app that brings me the most happiness.
Footpath supports iPhones and Android phones. You can also use it on the Web and iPad, but the phone is the best experience..
When you open the app, Footpath presents you with a map showing your current location. Tap with your finger to set a starting point.
Then tap again to the next point on your route. Footpath prompts you whether you want to walk, bike or drive.
Footpath connects the two points, snapping the route to follow roads and trails on the map. Or you can disable snapping and just map straight lines from point to point.
From there, you tap the next point on your route, then the next and so on until you’re done. Footpath shows you the distance as you go. When you want to get back to your starting point, Footpath presents you with the choice to loop back—in which case Footpath offers you the shortest route—or “out-and-back,” to retrace your path. I like to use the loop option, which often gives me a different route on my return.
You can preview the elevation along your route. I like to do that when planning my route, to check to see if the route is relatively flat, or if it takes me on a steep climb.
Here’s a different route—a steeper climb. The red bits on the line are the steepest.
Footpath doesn’t just know about streets and roads. It also knows about, well, footpaths, even “desire paths”—unofficial paths made by people walking across vacant land between one road and another.
Footpath gives you the option to open the starting point of a route in Apple Maps or Google Maps. I usually drive a few minutes to the starting point of my walk, so it’s useful to be able to easily map a driving route.1
When you’re walking, Footpath will give you audible turn-by-turn directions—that’s a premium feature, for paid subscribers. Footpath plays nice with my podcast app (Overcast), the Audible audiobook player and Spotify; when giving directions from Footpath, the podcast, audiobook or music playback pauses and then resumes when done. You can check turn-by-turn directions and a route map on your screen as you go.
Footpath has an Apple Watch companion app, which I’ve set to tap my wrist diffidently and silently when it’s time to turn again. The Watch app itself is not as easy to read as the phone app, so I mostly just use the Watch app when I am already familiar with the route and just need a couple of reminders about when and where to turn.
Footpath gives you the option to view several different types of maps. I use “Mapbox Streets,” which resembles the default Apple Maps or Google Maps view. Sometimes I use the satellite maps view when planning out a new route, which will show me if there are sidewalks all along the way, for safety. I’m OK walking along the shoulder if I’m alone, but I’m concerned about the dog getting hit by a car.
There are topographical maps, too, to show elevation—this sounds great in theory, but I am not skilled in reading those, so instead, I just map out the view with my finger and then view the elevation.
Footpath is a freemium app. The free version gets you capabilities including tap-to-map and saving up to five routes. The Footpath Elite subscription gives you cue sheets to tell you where to turn, turn-by-turn audio directions, unlimited saved routes, and more. Here’s more information about plans. The subscription is priced at $4/month or $24/year. I pay for an annual subscription.
Footpath works in conjunction with the Workouts app on the Apple Watch. I use both together—Footpath to map my route, and Workouts to record the walk.
Footpath isn’t perfect. The home screen is confusing. Even after using the app for years, I get confused as to how to find a saved route, for example.
I have never been able to figure out how to edit existing routes with Footpath, even though that’s a supported feature.
Routes mapped and saved on the iPad don’t reliably sync to the iPhone.
The controls for manually playing your next prompt are the same controls for pausing a podcast, so when someone stops me on my walk and I pause my podcast to chat, Footpath starts talking with me and I look like an idiot waiting for it to shut up.
Despite a few hiccups, Footpath is a great, user-friendly tool for people looking to inject variety and exploration into their walks, runs, bikes or drives. Footpath does the job when the journey is more important than the destination.
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The dog loves it when I park the car when we’re driving together because she’s sure that means a walk is going to begin. I feel like a fink when we’re actually going to the vet. ↩︎
There is a road called Princess View Drive near our house that I have driven on many times, but I have never seen a princess.
The American Nazis (the organization formerly known as Republicans) aren’t coming for Jews—now. They say they love Jews.
They’re coming for migrants and LGBTQ people. They’re turning women into breeding cows.
But they will come for the Jews soon enough. We will not have to wait long.
“AI search is a doomsday cult…. Does anyone even want an AI search engine?”
when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs – fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says AI search is worse than conventional search and could potentially kill the web. AI search feeds on existing blogs, articles and other websites, while removing incentives for people to create those things. In this scenario, generative AI is like a wild animal that kills everything in the food chain that feeds it and then starves to death.
Also, Cory notes that we gave Google a monopoly on search and Google in return was supposed to protect us from search spam, a job at which it is utterly failing. “Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it.”
For what it’s worth, I’ve been using ChatGPT for search, and have also used the Perplexity AI search engines. They’ve been fine for quick hits; I haven’t tried either on deep research.
Google is still good for some things, but I’ve noticed it falling down in two areas: Product reviews (I go to reddit or Wirecutter for those) and how-tos, where Google serves up a half-dozen videos before it gets to the actual instructions I’m looking for.
During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and later spent years in the Partisans fighting the Nazis) and I were walking toward a restaurant, and he expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”
Apple warns users to stop putting wet iPhones in rice (Gizmodo)
That was a big clue on a crime show. The detective noticed that the murder victim had bought a large quantity of rice, and surmised that the victim was using it to dry out a wet phone, which proved important to solving the murder.
When I was a boy attending Hebrew school, the Holocaust was living memory for the adults teaching us. They told us: “You think of yourselves as Americans first. That’s exactly how German Jews thought of themselves in the early 1930s.” I think about that more and more lately.
Cory’s Pluralistic blog turns four. Here, he talks once again about his Memex Method of taking notes in public. I have never been able to make that work for me, though I’ve tried. pluralistic.net
Alabama’s supreme court rules frozen embryos are ‘children’ theguardian.com
In a decision using flagrantly unconstitutional religious language, the court allows two wrongful death lawsuits to proceed against a fertility clinic.
Haley’s plan to unite the United States: pardon Trump. “It is unclear why or how Haley thinks this move would bring the American people together unless the together she speaks of is a civil war.” boingboing.net
“I just kind of think of her as a lowlife” Colorado GOP voters reject Lauren Boebert boingboing.net
My five-year-old Mac wheezes to a halt if I have more than a few Safari tabs open, but I recently switched to the Vivaldi browser, and now I have 93 open tabs. So, um, yay?
Stickers to manage social media replies. “Do not reply to deny my lived experience.” “Do not reply to tell me to use open source software.” “Do not reply to teach me about capitalism or enshittification. I know.” And more.
An in-depth explainer why the New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, which the AI community says would be catastrophic. arstechnica.com
Japanese startup Astroscale’s mission is cleaning up space junk. arstechnica.com
We watched the first episode of “Resident Alien,” about an extraterrestrial who assumes the identity of a doctor in a Colorado small town where people are colorful. “Northern Exposure” meets “Starman.” The show stars Alan Tudyk, who played Wash in “Firefly.” Pretty good. I’ll give it another try.
Before the IBM PC, There Was the TRS-80
Radio Shack, known for its DIY kits and gear, unveiled this low-cost computer in 1977 in a bid to capture the fledgling PC market.
I had forgotten that the consumer PC revolution started in the mid-late 1970s, even though I was a teen-ager then and aware of what was going on. I think of it as a mid-80s phenomenon.
Trust Between Southeastern San Diego Flood Survivors and Local Government Is Dead
Flooded residents of the Southcrest, Shelltown and Mountain View neighborhoods of San Diego say they’ve been abandoned by the city and county and some say politicians are trying to drive them out to inflate real estate prices.
Will Huntsberry at the Voice of San Diego:
The flood waters have receded, but in these southeastern San Diego neighborhoods a crisis of trust is now ripping through the streets. From block to block the narrative is the same: City officials knew for years the flood canals were clogged and did nothing to clean them. After the floods, city leaders didn’t jump into action to provide relief; it was neighbors and homegrown nonprofits.
The residents of these historically Black and Latino neighborhoods can draw but two conclusions. At best, city leaders don’t care if they are forced from their homes. At worst, city leaders want them gone.
…
In other words, city leaders purposefully allowed Shelltown, Southcrest and Mountain View to flood, so that other people could take the land.
City officials, of course, have offered many explanations for why they never cleaned Chollas Creek. The amount of money for stormwater improvement is dangerously low. Certain environmental regulations were hard to get around. They have also said the amount of rain was so severe that cleaning the canals would not have stopped the floods. But none of this has resonated with the flood survivors. Would so many calls for a channel to be cleaned have gone unanswered in La Jolla they wonder?
Now, they are all forced to watch as the fabric of their community is torn apart.
Jessica Calix adored her neighbors in Southcrest. She rented a two-bedroom for $1,650 per month — unheard of in today’s rental market. Now, she’s stuck in a motel, searching for a new place. She can barely find a studio apartment in the same price range.
That’s bad for her and other renters, Calix said. But it’s good for landlords.
“Landlords will clean their places up and rent them for an extra thousand dollars or more now,” Calix said.
Roughly 70 percent of people in Shelltown, Southcrest and Mountain View are renters, according to US Census data.
And it’s not just renters being pushed out, according to the rumors going around. Stories of cheap cash offers for waterlogged houses are also making the rounds.
Rain and possible flooding is forecast to start again in a few hours and continue two days.