The other day, a friend sent through a link to an interesting “new” technology that Apple have applied for a patent for - podmaps. Reading through the article it seemed oddly familiar, perhaps because I came up with the same idea two years ago. As most good ideas do, this one came about over a few beers when someone suggested that Multimap should do a podcast. Of course the idea of a Multimap podcast was perhaps a little odd, but it did get me thinking about what we could do with podcasts.

Screengrab of Bristol - Bath podcastAfter a little investigation and playing around with Apple’s “ChapterTool” I knocked up the Multimap Travel Directions Podcast. You should be able to try it by downloading the file and launching it in either iTunes or Quicktime. It takes advantage of all the great features available to podcast files. The file is split into “chapters” with each chapter being a step of the route. Podcast Chapters Each chapter has audio with a computer voice talking you through the directions for that step, an image attached to it which shows a map of that step, the text is included as the “title” (and is readable on your iPod’s screen) and there’s even a link to the route on multimap.com for when you’re viewing the podcast on your computer. (Note that the podcast above was made 2 years ago so uses old maps and probably links to the old multimap.com, keep reading to hear about the improvements though…)

So this is all very nice, but this thing took me a few hours to make by hand, surely there’s a better way? Well with all the great APIs that Multimap provides, yes there is. Though I was busy with a few other things I played around with this idea over the following 15 months or so. Every few months I’d write a few lines of code, come across a problem, get bored and put it down again. Finally though I got past all the problems (how to tell the length, in seconds, of an audio file, how to concatenate audio snippets, how to convert to AAC, and a few more) and managed to knock up a ruby script that could take a source and a destination and give you a podcast containing the directions. That was 9 months ago though and I’ve been sitting on it since. Seeing the news on Apple’s patent application has spurred me on to releasing it.

I spent a few hours last night updating the script so that it now works with our recently launched Static Maps API meaning that you’ll see a vast improvement in the map quality. The script requires OS X to work because it uses Apple’s ChapterTool and “say” command. It also needs SoX (for various sound conversions), the Perl CPAN module Audio::Wav and the FAAC library. I’ve packaged the script into a zipfile and put a README in there with some information on using it, I mention how to get and install the 3rd party packages in there too.

There’s obviously lots of improvements that could be made to the podcast, and I’m sure Apple will make many if they actually do release “podmaps”. All of the podcasts I’ve generated here have been made on my OS X Tiger installation, if you have Leopard you will be able to use the new speech synthesis voice that came with it to make better sounding podcasts. All the routes generated are currently driving directions but it would be a simple tweak to make walking directions. Extra functionality could also be added using more Multimap API functionality, such as highlighting places to eat as you’re passing them and things like that. For now I just thought I’d release it as-is and see what people think.

So, please download the script, play around with it, and let me know in the comments what you think of it. It might be fiddly to get it working but rather than get too technical in this post I thought I’d put that sort of thing into the README files. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to sign up for the Multimap Open API to get a key to use. Here’s a few more routes to give you an idea of what it can do too:

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