13 INTERACTIVE CITY MAPS, TOOLS AND GUIDES

Urban Apps: 13 Interactive City Maps, Tools & Guides
By Steph, Web Urbanist, 15 July 2013.

Chances are, even if you’re a lifelong resident of a particular city, you don’t know every nook and cranny, every food truck location, or the lore of every interesting local building. Apps for smartphones, tablets and other gadgets are making big urban centres feel smaller than ever, making it easy to catch a ride, find cheap eats, check out street art and make new friends.

1. Eat Cheap - Roaming Hunger

Find out where your next meal is parked with Roaming Hunger, an app that shows real-time food truck locations in your area. The app not only displays the trucks on a map, with their hours at that location, but also allows you to sort results by meal, and browse menus. Additional apps are city-specific, like Street Food App, which currently shows schedules for Boston, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.

2. Maps and Travel Guides - City Maps 2Go

Want access to maps while traveling abroad, without gobbling up roaming data or lurking in a spot that offers wi-fi? City Maps 2Go downloads maps for the cities of your choice for offline use, including millions of POI (restaurants, bars, hotels etc.), 500,000 Wikipedia entries for sites and attractions, and travel guides. It’s available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

3. Connect - MeetMe

Among the most popular apps to show you who’s nearby and looking to meet new people, MeetMe gives both social butterflies and the shy an easy way to connect. You’ll probably find more people looking to date than to make new friends, and it might be easier to just walk up to someone and introduce yourself than spend your time scrolling through photos, but hey - whatever works.

4. Avoid Your Friends - Hell is Other People

Maybe, instead of making new friends, you want to avoid the ones you already have. There’s an app for that, too. Hell is Other People will show you where your friends are based on check-ins on Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram and other networks, and provide ‘safe zones’ where you can hang out without being recognized. Of course, it only works if your contacts are avid users of social media, and you might find yourself relegated to unexpected places in the city.

5. Find Street Art - 1AM Mobile

This free photo app called 1AM Mobile lets users pinpoint, share and discover street art in their own communities before it’s gone, as it often is within days or weeks of completion. Shoot photos of street art and the app will map them, date them and credit you as the photographer before sharing them worldwide.

6. Urban Exploration - Abandoned

If you’re not of the belief that finding abandoned places yourself is half the fun, an app will make urban exploration almost too easy for you. The ‘Abandoned’ iPhone app relies on  user input to locate abandoned sites, map them, and add photos and stories. Don’t want to share your finds? Set your map to private, so only you can see where your favourite local sites are.

7. Turn Your City into a Gameboard - MapAttack!

MapAttack at WhereCamp 2011 from aaronpk on Vimeo.

Inspired by a real-life version of Pac-Man called Pacmanhattan, the MapAttack app turns any neighbourhood or park into a virtual game board for four to twenty players, encouraging you to explore your city in a new way. Two teams are pitted against each other with the goal of capturing the most digital points on the game board, with players using their smartphones as maps. The players have to physically reach each coloured dot on the map to score points.

8. Find a Spot - Park Me

Scoring a parking spot can be one of the most frustrating aspects of traveling by car in a congested city, especially for visitors unfamiliar with the area. ParkMe is an app that lets you find parking options before you even leave the house, listing availability and fees as well as maps and directions to guide you there.

9. Get Out of a Jam - Beat The Traffic

Locate traffic jams on your travel route and find a way around them with Beat the Traffic, a free app that will show you real-time traffic conditions, estimate travel times and offer live camera views. For a fee, you can save your most-used routes and get personalized traffic reports.

10. Catch a Ride - Lyft

Catching a quick and convenient ride is easier than ever with Lyft, an app that pairs riders with pre-screened community drivers. It’s cheaper than taking a cab, it’s an easy way to meet new people, and it helps reduce congestion on the road.

11. Contribute to Local Info - GeoData Extension

GeoData Extension is a Wikipedia app for iPhones and Andriods that enables users to geo-tag articles, add photos, and submit new information. It also makes it easy to find points of interest nearby, with an interactive map that will take you on a virtual tour.

12. Play a Fantasy Game - Shadow Cities

If real life is just boring compared to the fantasy role-playing games you play online, you can extend that world into your actual surroundings. Shadow Cities turns your neighbourhood into a “magical battleground” wherein you go exploring, hunt down rogue spirits, and obtain new spells as you level.

13. Paint Your City - Tagtool

Paint your city with light and record the results with Tagtool, a fun iPad app that enables you to create your own animations and project them onto urban surfaces. You can even collaborate with another user to create interactive light shows for a crowd. An AV adapter brings the fun inside, if you’d rather just play around at home.

[Source: Web Urbanist. Edited.]