electronic climbing guidebooks?


Welcome to the future of guidebooks, an iphone app, with . Interested to see how it works on an iphone screen, but from my uses of said iphone for everything else, I'm already looking forward to seeing a Euro guidebook do the same. Expensive though at $30 (although, I see that if you buy the app, you get the paper-based version for 50% of the cost), what do you think?!

If this thing works as well as it could (gps location built-in) and even logging of all routes I've done (as it looks like it can) so I can just use as my own personal journal, I'm sold! They look like a serious improvement over the old ipod version from years ago too.

Link credit: thanks to ClimbingNarc.com for this one, once again.

Comments

  1. nice app, I'd love to see one for the ukclimbing crags db, then you could have the added info from community generated content, frequency of ascents, recent pictures. It would be amazing. I asked the UKclimbing people whether they would create an API (I'm interested in programtaically accessing my climbing diary and log book), but they are a small team, and afraid of loosing the value in the rockfax DB , which drives most of their revenue, so for the time being the answer is no.

    I should say, I can understand their concerns, though I disagree with them.

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  2. yeah, it's pretty impressive, had a play with it last night and as a first effort, it's really useful and thought out. A few times where I felt like I was going in circles, but it's pretty intuitive and user-friendly to use.

    As for UKclimbing.com, that would be amazing, but I guess it'll take time for them to come round :) As you point out, it's owned by Rockfax, so I'm guessing they'll start to integrate it in some form (like the above iphone app)......nice if you could get in an tinker with it though! Be cool to see what you could do :)

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  3. I can see how it could be handy alright, but a good old paper guide doesn't run out of battery! As my technical drawing teacher said years ago "Computer design is all well and good, but there'll always be a place for a man with a pencil and paper"

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  4. think we're all on the same page, errr, screen here :) electronic will have it's uses, but nothing like paper also!

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  5. Hi Neal, D.Duggan here. This iphone app thingy. I just made a bouldering guide and a guide for the sports area, But how does a techno phob like me put the guides onto this app, for everyone (with the app) too use?

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  6. Ian, you might be a good person to respond to this - spending more time programming than me!
    Diarmuid, honestly not sure - I know a lot of these have to be specifically developed for this type of use....

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  7. diarmuid,

    Check out Alpinewerx's website.(the developer of the app)

    Looks like they can help you.

    www.alpinewerx.com

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