Schmap.com has a freshly iPhone-optimized site that offers US city guides and local search with some very cool mapping and other features thrown in.
Once you choose your city, the site is very well laid out into various top-level areas of interest to look at – everything from restaurants, bars and nightlife to tours, hotels, shopping, outdoor activities and more. In each of those main categories, you can choose to drill down to more specific areas that you’re after – types of cuisine under restaurants, nightclubs / wine bars / pubs under Bars & Clubs, and all that sort of thing – or you can just choose a listing of the ‘Top’ entries in each field.
After selecting an individual place listing, you get an initial screen with the place’s address details, which you can tap to jump out to view it in the Maps application, its phone number (tap to call of course), and a URL for it if there is one.
Details provided for places are pretty good – with an easy to spot Review and Photo tab for each one. Most of the reviews are quite short and are dated 2007 and come from wcities.com, not from ‘normal’ users and patrons of the places. I’m not too worried by this, as there are a number of other good options – Earthcomber has been one of my favorites for a while now – for finding more extensive reviews.
Here’s the description for one of Austin’s most spectacular natural swimming holses, Hamilton Pool:
And here’s somewhere to go after a hard day’s swimming:
Probably the coolest thing about Schmap.com is that once you’re viewing an individual place, no matter which screen you’re on for it, you can just tilt the iPhone to landscape mode and it will instantly (or thereabouts) show you a Google Maps page with your place’s location pinpointed. This works well and very fast. Tilt it back to portrait, and you’ll go straight back to what you were viewing before.
There are a few things that could certainly be improved with the Schmap site. Some of the listings do seem dated and even a little inaccurate, at least for Austin – night club listings show some venues that are definitely not clubs, and the sports bar list fails to show several that are now established and popular, for example.
Another annoying thing – though I have a feeling this may be more of a Safari / Webclips limitation – is that even if I create my webclip while within the Austin pages, when I launch it I only get to the initial screen where I have to choose my city again. For finding places on the fly, it would obviously be a lot better if this would remember my city and let me go straight into it.
Overall, I like Schmap a lot so far. I’ve definitely added it to the shortlist of apps and sites used to scope out good places to go. Give it a try at the URL below and let us know what you think of it …
Via: TUAW
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