We are, of course, big fans of the iPhone’s Map application, and now reader Derek Mendenhall weighs in with a tip that makes a great feature even more useful for that next extended road trip:
Something I just found today while I was e-mailing my wife directions, I was on my computer at work, went to maps.google.com and searched out some directions. Then I clicked the send link, which gave me the option of e-mailing it to myself as well, so I did.
I opened that e-mail on my iPhone, which is essentially just a long link back to that specific page. The iPhone opens the link using Maps, not Safari, and laid in the directions for me. I thought if you’re going on a trip and need multiple sets of driving directions for different places and things that you may want to see along the way, you could look up the different routes, e-mail them to yourself, and now the directions are just a click away in Mail! Very handy while driving.
Indeed. My modus operandi for travel has been to print out the Google driving directions in advance of the trip, and having whoever’s riding shotgun handle the task of navigating via print-out. Derek’s tip certainly saves the hassle of hauling along a stack of driving directions the next time I travel.
I tried this and the link opened in Safari, not in Maps. ???
I tried it and it worked for me.
Maybe another good solution will be to put the link in a bookmark and synchronize it to your phone. That should do the trick too.
Steve
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Great tip. Works great if you do not alter the route that Google initially comes up with. E.g. I mapped out a trip from Florida to Mass. but did not want to take I-95 the entire way, so I customized my route by selecting the blue line and dragging it to another Interstate to change the route to effectively go around DC. This feature works great in Google and receives great when you get it on another Mac/PC. However, when you send it to your iPhone, you get only the first leg of the trip. i.e. to the point where you first altered the route. Don't know if this is an iPhone quirk or a google one. Suspect its iPhone related as it works great on my Mac and PC.
Not bad, actually something that was unexpected. My gripe is still that you cannot go the other way and that is to text the turn by turn to another cell phone. I have had only a few occasions where that would have been handy, either for myself or when I get a call from a person coming to see me that needs additional directions.
LOVE this tip!
~C
I tried this trick. Worked great for sending a map. However, here is what happened when I obtained directions in GoogleMaps and emailed that to myself from the link at GoogleMaps: I opened the email on my iPhone and clicked on the link; the destination address and surrounding map appeared but I got an error message that said "Search Failed" and the directions did not appear--only the destination map.
Tried the directions trick again. As I noted in an earlier post, there was a failure when directions were received on iPhone. I repeated the search in GoogleMaps, emailed it to my iPhone and it worked. The only difference was that I listed the origin as "CVG airport" rather than just "CVG" when I did the search in GoogleMaps. In Googlemaps, apparently, "CVG" is enough to do the directions search but not enough on iPhone. go figure.
They should make it so you can text yourself a link to the directions. Heck, they should make it so we can MMS, period!