For those of you about to make the most of summer's warmer days and venture out on a camping vacation, a recent App Smart column covered a bunch of apps that turn your smartphone or tablet into a camper's companion. But, as ever, there are many different apps available in the various app stores that claim to do similar jobs.
For planning your camping trip, the $2.99 Android app Campfinder Campgrounds is one of the better campsite locator apps available because it has a database of over 18,000 campgrounds of different types across the United States and Canada. The app lets you refine your searches by criteria like campsite name, state, current location or even whether the campsites offer discounts for members of particular groups like AAA. It's well organized and, perhaps unusually for Android apps, it's actually good to look at. The price may dissuade you, but the developer does seem to be keeping this app up to date, which means it should remain useful for several trips.
Also on Android the free app 101+ Camping Recipes may help you spice up your campfire food choices. It's very simply designed and really has no bells or whistles beyond being able to search through its contents. Essentially it's a text-based list of recipes that you can cook outdoors, but it's got some interesting options (anyone for Camp au Grain Potatoes?) and some surprising ones - like Aunt Sarah's Chili Sauce, which requires that you simmer it “for days.†The app even works when you're far away from any network connection.
Tying knots is often a very useful camping trick, but do you know which knot to use when, and how to tie more than a basic granny knot? The Bear Gryllsâ€"Knots app is a $0.99 iOS app that can help you with this problem. With content from the famous British outdoorsman himself, the app uses photos of the knots being tied in actual rope to help you work out how to do it yourself, with one photo for each of the different stages of tying. There's also a very simple text guide that goes with the photos.
This app uses an unusual scrolling-page interface that personally I'm not fond of, though I can see it may be user-friendly when you don't have too many spare hands to fiddle with small onscreen controls. I also wish they'd used different-colored rope for some of the photos because the black rope used sometimes makes it hard to see which bit of rope goes where.
Finally, when you're out camping knowing local sunset and sunrise times and up-to-date weather is always a good idea. The $0.99 Living Earth app on iOS is perhaps the best-looking app that has these functions and more, because as well as calculated sunset and sunrise times on a per-city basis, it includes near real-time satellite imagery of cloud data, weather maps and forecasts. Its main trick is a beautiful animated view of the globe, which shows the weather and the approaching sunrise or sunset. It needs a Net connection for its live data, though, so it's only useful if you're camping where you have one.
Your smartphone really can be like a digital Swiss army knife when you're camping. Sure, it doesn't have a tool for getting stones out of horse's hooves, but its technology can help with many other outdoors tasks.
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The CoPilot GPS navigator app has just been introduced for Windows Phone; it has long been available on iOS and Android. It's similar to other GPS apps and has offline maps so you won't burn through mobile data. It's available as a free trial so you can see if you like its style.
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