When I first heard about Fugawi's (as in "where the fugawi?!") new mapping app for the Apple iPhone, it seemed quite intriguing:

• The only Topo App to include all of USA and all Canadian provinces!
• Seamlessly loads raster topographic maps via the iPhone internet connection and caches them in memory for use when outdoors and not in 3G, EDGE or Wi-Fi coverage.
• Easiest Waypoint Editor Ever! Tap and hold on the screen to drop waypoints which may be custom edited by name, icon, exact co-ordinates, and text description. Easily move waypoints with a simple tap and drag.
• FREE Online Waypoint Storage, Transfer and Backup
• Waypoints can be transferred directly to your free account at www.X-Traverse.com which is included with your purchase of Fugawi iMap.You can move your waypoints as GPX files to many other software products including Google Earth, or you can create waypoints in a third party software for upload to your iPhone.
• Pinpoint your current location, shown in latitude / longitude or UTM, with an easily visible position marker.
• Seamless map moves as you move.
• Zoom in or out of the entire available national map collection for the USA or Canada.
• See details such as scale, elevation contours, water bodies, major roads, railways, bridges, urban land use, and more.

With all those features and a price of only $4.99, I bought it immediately. Now, after having played around with it for a while, I'm no longer intrigued. The app's problems fall into two categories: missing features and user experience.

Missing Features

The people who buy topographic maps generally want to use them in the back country, not at home. That means they won't have an Internet connection, so the maps need to be able to be stored on the device. Fugawi does cache the map data onto the device, but they don't make it clear just how many maps will be cached or the order in which they'll be stored and deleted. Nor is there any way to specify which maps MUST be kept on the device. That's an automatic fail right there.

iMap supports user created or uploaded waypoints, but it doesn't support track logs. This is another instant fail. Using waypoints to follow a trail is a very clumsy way of doing things, particularly if you're hiking instead of following a dirt road. An off-road navigation system MUST include track log support.

User Experience

I tested the app under the the assumption that a user would not have Wi-Fi access. To connect to the Internet, I used a 3G wireless connection (Rogers). Overall, the app felt rather sluggish and it didn't take long before I became frustrated with the constant waiting. When it starts up, the app takes about 4 seconds to load. Once the map is displayed, it took about 12 seconds to zoom in by one level deep. When panning to another location, it took about 14 seconds to load all the map tiles for the new location. If you're moving around slowly, things get a bit better, because the app loads adjacent map tiles, anticipating that you'll probably pan over to see them. The reason for the slow performance is simply due to the fact that, like many digital topographic maps, the data is in the form of raster graphics files, not vector data. In other words, it's downloading images of maps, rather than the actual vector or location data. Besides being bigger and therefore slower to download, you can't smoothly zoom into images. That's why Fugawi has to load a new set of map tiles when you zoom in. It's downloading higher resolution maps. This is quite different from vector-based map data (the Google Maps app is an example of this).

The key point, if you haven't guessed is that it became aggravating to use. But even worse, it made me cranky with my iPhone, which was a very unpleasant feeling. We're back on speaking terms, now that I've stopped using iMap, but it will take some time before things get back to the way they used to be.

The map rendering speed wasn't my only gripe, though. The other thing that really bothered me was the strange way that they handled the display of my current position. When my current position was displayed, I could pan to another location, but if I zoomed in (after waiting 14 secs for the files to download, of course), it would then teleport me right back to my current position. To stop this from happening, I had to turn off my current position display before panning elsewhere.

Waypoint handling was also disappointing. It was easy enough to create waypoints, but very difficult, if not impossible, to delete them. The waypoint tool sometimes let me grab an existing waypoint and delete it. Other times, it wouldn't.

iMap comes with a free account on X-Traverse.com so you can transfer your waypoints to/from their server over the Internet. This feature worked fine in my limited testing.

The iMap screen.	Zoomed in a little.	Zoomed in all the way.
Settings screen.	Help screen.	Current location.
Location of centre of screen (can use this to jump to a particular location rather than use the painful scrolling process).	Waypoint create/move/edit/delete tool.	A waypoint.
Waypoint information.	List of waypoints on the iPhone (in My Library).	Exporting waypoints to X-Traverse website.
After exporting, my X-Traverse account now has a .gpx file containing the websites that were sent from the iPhone.

My conclusions (no big surprises, here):

First, the good stuff:

• At $4.99, it's a very affordable way to get digital topographic maps. If you've got a lot of patience, you might find it to be a good value.
• Maps for all of the USA and Canada. That covers a lot of territory! If you make infrequent journeys into specific areas (ie: you don't need to store a wide range of maps on the iPhone), this is a great way to easily get maps of those areas.

And now the bad stuff:

• The user interface needs work. This seems more like a beta release than a version 1.0.
• Download speed is an issue but I don't know if there's anything Fugawi can do to improve it without switching to vector-based map data.
• No track logs! Bad. (Fugawi plans on adding this feature in a future release.)
• No ability to specify which maps to store on the iPhone.

This is one of those apps that people will buy to show off their iPhone's abilities, but to succeed as a useful navigation tool for off-roaders, it needs more work.

...lars