What I Learnt Today

The Coastal Walk in Noosa National Park is surely one of the world’s great casual walks.

Capped by a ‘Cap’ at Aroma’s at each end, it takes about one hour  return to Dolphin Point. The track skirts along the coastline around a number of bays and through groves of eucalyptus and pockets of rainforest. When the surf is ‘working’ on the points there is the added attraction of muscular surfie dudes and bikini babes along the path, and you can watch them catching the famous right hand breaks.

It is our family philosophy that there is nothing in nature so beautiful that it can’t be improved by a good app. So we used the Noosa walk to test the iPhone app  ‘Kinetic’.

Kinetic uses the acceriometer, compass and GPS system built in to the iPhone to keep track of where you go and what you are doing. It times your activity, tells you how fast you are going, and shows a map of where you are. It records all this information and at the end of your walk it shows you a map of where you have been (Hansel and Gretel, take note). It also records how fast you were going at each stage, and your altitude, so that you can see when you were going up hill.

It is mainly targeted at runners, and includes some training regimes to help you run your next marathon. We had very good success in using it to record our walks, and also to map our routes when we went kayaking. 

The maps can be stored on the Kinetic website and shared via email, facebook or twitter. 

The recording of the Noosa walk is here 

and the map of our kayak through the canals is here. 

The app can work in the background, which means you can play music or check the web and Kinetic will continue to record your activity. It does eat up battery power, so make sure you start fully charged. It also helps to preserve battery life by turning off Wifi and Bluetooth on the iPhone. The app does access google maps if it can, so if you are overseas (say, in Sri Lanka), make sure your data access is turned off, or you could run up some significant data charges. Also, remember to press the ‘Lock Screen’ button in the app before you put the phone in our pocket, or you may find it accidentally pushes the ‘stop’ button prematurely.

We found that Kinetic worked very well and added value to our activity regime. It is on special for $4.99. There is also a free ‘lite’ version that does nearly everything the full version does – so you can test it out without risk.

Screenshots of Kinetic below. Back to the track for us.