This video is in an article over at Ski The East (thanks Mike). Thanks again for all the support from the TGR guys.

By the way, there’s a good crash segment at the end of this video.

Special thanks to Rogge at Ski The East for writing the article, I Ski Dead People, on this and all the props from the TGR and Newschoolers crowd.

Ian got some great shots of me wreaking havoc on the pow. Click the video link below and make it full size in HD. I threw Ian’s stills.

Below are a couple of the good shots. Click the thumbnails for the full sized image.

Lower Lord

Lower Lorder got Deep

Trip reports rock! I love experiencing epic conditions, even when I’m sitting in the office. The stories are great and pictures are always gorgeous. Most of the time, however, I have no idea where the TR took place. That’s why I love seeing GPS tracking.

GPS tracking records your location at a specific time interval. You can then download the recorded points to your computer and open them in a program like Google Earth to see your exact path. GPS tracking is cool, but I don’t see it too often unless I’m on Time For Tuckerman. TGR has them sometimes and NS kids want to spend their cash on tall t’s instead of a GPS tracker. So for those NS kids with an iPhone, here is a simple, $3.99 solution: Trails.

Trails is a very intuitive, GPS tracking app for the iPhone and iPod Touch with GPS. It is also smart enough to implement some clutch power saving features. Despite those features, if you’re operating in the cold keep your iPhone in your jacket near your body to stay warm or get an extra battery. I recommend the Mophie Juice Box Air. It makes your phone twice as thick, but the rugged plastic case and 2x battery life make up for it.

Download and Setup Trails

Download Trails from iTunes here. Once it’s installed, click the Trails icon to open the app. Once open, click the settings icon at the bottom of the screen. Trails comes with 4 different preset activities, jogging, hiking, biking, and driving, to help produce a nice report. My tracking is set to jogging when I’m skiing and hiking when I’m not.

Scroll down to to the live map section of settings. Live map enabled and Controls enabled can be shut off when trekking in the woods to conserve battery. I also recommend shutting off wifi. If you do not have cell service where you’re going, put your phone in Airplane Mode as well.

Now, scroll all the way to the bottom and enter your email address in the Standard email section. Trails sends GPS logs to your email. A picture of the entire preference menu is below.

Starting a GPS Log

With Trails running, select the My Tracks icon at the bottom of the window. Then, select the plus sign in the upper corner to start a new GPS log. Add a name and description for the GPS log and save it. Trails will begin tracking your GPS coordinates and altitude. For specific information on using Trails, check out the Trails manual.

One important thing to note, Trails stops recording GPS points when you receive a call. You can resume the GPS log by restarting trails. If your iPhone is jailbroken, Trails will not record GPS points while run with backgrounder, an app that lets other apps run continuously in the background.

Showing the GPS Log in Google Earth

Email the GPS log to yourself when you are back in cell or wifi range. From the My Tracks page, select the log you want to open and click the email icon. Select Email from the Export options, make sure your email is correct, and hit send. Emails are sent through the Trails server, but the author has assured users he does not store the GPS logs. In the future, it would be nice to configure your own method of getting the files.

Check your email. It comes from Trails and is titled Your iPhone track. There are two files attached to the email. A GPX and a KML file. Google Earth opens KML files. Below is a GPS log from me playing around on my Katana. Take a screenshot or select File->Email->Email Image and save the image Google Earth creates to do the same thing. Put this in your trip report!

Coming Up

In my next post, I’ll talk about the other things in Trails you can use to make a nicer trip report. This includes geotagging photos, displaying your logs statistics, and graphing speed and altitude.

I’ve reimplemented the forum list and thread listing page to handle the new TTTableViewController. The app looks visually identical to the previous version, but everything is much smoother. It looks like regex is very reliable on the iPhone. All new screen scraping code will implement the RegexKit framework instead of the ugly NSScanner code.

This week I hope to finish the load more button on the thread listings page and implement per-page sectioning of posting threads. Anyone follow that?

If you’d like to follow the app’s progress and see screenshots as it comes together, follow PowShot over on Twitter.

As promised earlier, here’s a screenshot.

I found iClockr over at Smashing Magazine. It’s time tracking software. I’ve joke that this project will take a few hundred hours. Now, I”ll know. Starting today, I’ve worked 6 hours and 14 minutes. I did about 60 hours before today as well.

I’m not quite as far on the app as I’d like to be at this moment in time. My full-time work schedule can be quite hectic and the summer days have been quite nice. This is Vermont. We don’t get many nice days. However, my total investment in this application is well over 150 hours. I have a recycling bin full of energy drinks that can attest to that. Now for the interesting info

The first drop to testers will include the following functionality:

• Main forum browsing
• Thread creation
• Reply to a post in the thread
• Quoting responses in replies
• Displaying of a user’s information in the post (e.g. user name, date of post, karma, etc).

I hope to implement the following by the time the application is ready for release:

• Full main, regional, cult, camp, and event forums.
• Mod forum/cult functionality
• User profile browsing
• Private Messages

Depending on how quickly the UI development goes, I’m going to ignore support for camps and event forums and instead work on the media sections. Media is what users are after more than camp/event forums.

To the geeks, this application implements the Three20 UI toolkit used in the iPhone Facebook app. I first used it for its URL disk caching abilities. However, pouring through the available functionality, the toolkit provides me with nearly everything I need. I’ve only had to hack in small bits of functionality.

Some of the cooler, underlying technology about the app:

• Information disk caching (HTML and images)
• Underlying code is unit tested with +95% code coverage using the Google Toolbox for Mac, Hamcrest, OCMock, GCov, and CoverStory
• Three20 tookit with additional hacks to support custom HTTP headers and the TTMessageController in landscape mode.

I’m going to pass on posting a video for now. I found a few bugs that need to be ironed out after updating to the latest three20 release.

Saturday was a decent snow day. A lot of tracked pow. The entire group broke apart throughout the day.  Mandy got cold and does was she does; goes to the bar, gets drunk, and becomes friends with the bartender.

Brad, Shev, and I did the Dip at the end of the day and Margaret went to pick us up.  Before she went in, Shev was suppose to rush down and stop her. He wanted to warm up before going over to the Dip. He missed her and she ended up sitting at the Dip for at least 40 minutes. She ran Pablo and Afsheen on a few laps though. My bad. I felt pretty bad about it even though it wasn’t a big deal.

All my friends left Saturday night, so Sunday Alan, Patrick, and I did some backcountry exploring.  We found a really sick spot. Below are two of the videos.  The first is me following Alan and the second is me coming down a line above the Dip parking lot shot by Pablo.  Zero complaints.