iPhone for SUP

Apple’s iPhone is a great tool for anyone, but it has some features and available applications that make it particularly great for Stand Up Paddle Surfing. The phone I’m going to cover is the 3G version, which is handiest since it has built-in GPS capabilities. In fact the iPhone GPS is especially useful since it has special features that increase the accuracy, even when GPS satellites are obscured by weather conditions or terrain.

Unfortunately the iPhone is not waterproof, so you need a dry carrier of some sort. There are some fairly expensive and clumsy hard case versions, but the touch screen of the iPhone makes hard cases problematic. Thin clear drybags enable you to operate the phone right through the bag, and both talk and listen through the bag or via headphones.  My current favorite is the OverBoard case, which has a compact closure system and a built-in headset jack. The only drawback is that the back of the case is opaque so you can’t use the phone’s camera without taking it out of the case. Overboard makes a bag with a camera window on the back, but it doesn’t have a jack. Damn–they’re so close. Maybe they’ll do a mashup of the two cases. I sent them an email about it, but they responded (more or less correctly) that the iPhone camera is so lame that they think most people are more interested in an armband and flotation, which are hard to provide along with a camera window. What they are not considering is geocoding photos, which I find extremely useful. Even a fairly crappy picture becomes interesting when you automatically know EXACTLY where it was taken. Anyway, here’s overboard’s MP3 case, and it really is a very fine product:

As it is the iPhone is great for downwinders and distance paddling. It has a clock, a stopwatch to time your run, it’s a superb iPod player for your music, and if you or someone else gets into trouble or needs a lift your phone is right there. I consider it an important safety device. But it really comes into its own when you add applications that are available either for free or very inexpensively. There are currently about 30,000 applications available for iPhones. But before we explore iPhone Apps, let me give you a tip about music for paddling.

Automatic Playlists
You might be used to putting together playlists of music for your MP3 player. I find it really tedious, so I’m really pleased that Apple came up with a wonderful automated playlist building tool that’s very appropriately called “Genius”. If you have the latest version of iTunes (free on either PCs or Macs) you have Genius. To turn Genius on you click “Store” in the top iTunes menu, then select “Turn On Genius”. iTunes will be busy for quite a while, indexing your songs, checking with the iTunes store about some mysterious characteristics of every song you own, and building the database that Genius uses. When you want to build a Genius playlist you just select a song that is representative of the music you want. Click on the Genius button (a little atom symbol in the lower right corner of the iTunes screen) and Genius builds you a playlist of compatible songs assembled from your library–the songs you own.

I have no idea of how it builds the lists, but they are great. Really great. The songs don’t sound all the same, and they are not all from the same kind of band or even the same genre. They just work really well together. They remind me of an old disk jockey that used to work at a musty meat market bar in Eugene Oregon called Foo’s Spinnaker about thirty years ago. The guy would somehow assemble playlists on the fly from a huge vinyl collection he carted around. He made music link together emotionally so well that he controlled the mood. People who experienced his talents remember him all these years later. The Genius isn’t quite that good, but it’s close.

Sometimes it’s so good it’s just plain weird. Who knew that Dunk n’ Dine by The Georgia Satellites goes perfectly with Thick and Thin by the Black Crowes and Ride, Ride, Ride by Foghat–but it absolutely does.

You can give the lists a memorable name and save them by first clicking Edit>Select All, then clicking File>New Playlist From Selection. Then you can add the playlists to your iPhone by connecting your iPhone to your computer. When the iPhone sysnc screen appears click the Music tab. Check the Sync Music box, then click the Selected Playlists button, and check the box next to the playlist you just saved. You can build genius lists on your iPhone as well, but I find it convenient to have a selection of playlists that I know suit the kind of paddling I’m planning to do.

Finding Your Way
On to more specific SUP things. You have a lot of choices for planning where to go and/or tracking your travels. At the base level there’s a nice implementation of Google Maps that enables you to look at satellite pictures of your planned route. “Wow, that reef sure goes out a looong ways”, or “where did that waterfall come from” are both obstacles that are fine to discover when looking at a google map–much better than bumping into them.

So far we’ve just talked about fundamental features. Moving up a BIG step are the GPS apps.

So far my favorite Stand Up Paddling App is EveryTrail. Everytrail is both a free stand-alone application and a connector to the excellent GPS experiential site, also called Everytrail (http://www. everytrail.com). The GPS features we are adding to Ke Nalu are patterned after Everytrail.

You can download the Everytrail App by browsing the Appstore on your iPhone, and then search for EveryTrail, or go to the Travel Category and look for it.

The iPhone has to stay active while the EveryTrail application is tracking your run and iPhones consume a lot of power when all the features are running, so you’ll find it works best for SUP tracking if you go to the general iPhone Settings menu set the screen brightness of your iPhone to the lowest setting, turn off WiFi and 3G. Then under the General> Network setting, turn 3G off, under General>Autolock select Never so that the iPhone does not sleep while recording a trip (this stops all applications).

Don’t use the iPhone lock feature to keep buttons from randomly being pushed while in your drybag, instead lock your iPhone with the lock button in the recording view of EveryTrail.

Using the application couldn’t be easier. Click on the app, when it loads you’ll see this screen:

To start recording a trip click the Start button. To lock the phone once your trip is started click lock. To take a geocoded photo click Photo and then the camera works in the normal manner.

Once you have finished your trip you can turn stop the recorder and temporarily save your trip. If you want to upload it remember that you’ve turned 3G and WiFi off, so it will be slow until you turn those back on.

You can view a map of your trip on your iPhone by looking at it in your saved trips, or you can go to EveryTrail and see it on your computer.

While you are in EveryTrail you can download a .GPX file of your trip for uploading to Ke Nalu or embed the widget version into any web page.

This article is getting too long, so INext time: More Apps, including a realtime speedometer and distance recorder; wind, surf and swell forcasts; weather forecasts; training and conditioning applications; emergency services; and photo tools. See you then.