iPhone App Review – Firepin

I am slowing reviewing most of the GPS iPhone apps in hopes of finding the perfect app for my needs. Firepin caught my eye after I visited their website (http://firepin.com/) so I wanted to do a review right away. I went into this app review with a little grudge on my shoulder after reviewing EveryTrail. Firepin does look promising but how does it stack up against some of the other GPS iPhone apps?

After downloading Firepin I decided to fire it up and do a quick track to start the day. The one thing that struck me was how easy it was to get started. It is really straight forward so no need to look for ny help options. The main screen says Press Start to begin recording. At the bottom of the screen in addition to the start button there is a Share, Maps, and Config button. When I clicked the Start button I was shown a screen that gives me the general details I would expect. Accuracy, lat/lon, and altitude are displayed. After you get started there is also a message on how many pins have been dropped. This is where Firepin is a little different. As you travel the app drops pins along your normal track path. Then at the end you get a big Firepin. Visually the pins are a nice touch.

The Share button will open and send an email with a link back to the Firepin website. This allow you to share your tracka. Sharing is easy and a must have feature for me. The Maps button will give you a list of your recent tracks. The tracks are listed by the title you have given them on the Config screen. Clicking one of your tracks will display a screen with options to show the track on Google Maps and an option to post it to Twitterrific. The Twitter integration is a nice feature they recently added.

The map inserted below is my trip to drop off one of my kids at school last week. You can click any of the pin markers to get lat/long, accuracy and time stamp.

There are a few things that the developer can do to improve the app and website experience. For starters I found that the embed code they offer for your track doesn’t have the closing iframe tag to properly use that code. I couldn’t figure out why the their iframe code was breaking the layout on my blog. But in the end all I had to do was add the missing iframe end tag. I posted a message on the Firepin blog and I hope they fix this issue soon. The other suggestion I had was to change the way they coded the webpage you use to embed a Google Map with your track in your blog/website. They hard coded the width and height of the map in the iframe content. This prevents anyone from changing the size of the map to fit their website/blog size. That needs to be fixed ASAP. I hope they make that fix soon. And finally there is no download of the GPX files like many other iPhone GPS apps/websites. I hope they add this in the future as well.

The one thing that is different from other apps is their website login. You do not need a userid/password to access your tracks. Bravo Firepin! This is a very nice feature that I can appreciate. The way the login does works is via an access code that the apps gives you. You then enter the code on their website. For the most part this make your tracks anonymous. It works very well.

Overall Firepin distinguishes itself from the other iPhone GPS apps I have used with the pin drops as you travel. The interface is clean, easy to use, and well planned out. The web integration is better than their competition. There is a lot of help and instructions on their website at http://firepin.com/ that you have access to after you login. I will be using Firepin again. If they added the ability to goetag photos to the map it just might be a perfect solution for me needs.