Are You En Route Yet?

Posted by Bogdan Lazar

En Route iPhone App Review.

Meet ups with friends are fun, but living in a big city can prove to be a hassle when trying to get together, especially when you live some ten miles away from each other and the meet up point is somewhere in the middle. Unless you want to be the first to arrive and wait for the others, you’d better be well prepared and have some knowledge of both your route and your friends’ routes to the meet up point. But what if there was a way to keep track of where you friends are on the route and also let them know where you are. Now you can with En Route! for the iPhone.

How does En Route! work?

This is an app that’s dead-easy to use. It requires no manual and there’s no learning curve. It’s just what you’d want from a well designed app. Start the app, let it pick up your current location and create a trip. Start typing your destination and lo and behold, the app will suggest things as you type. Next, choose to share your trip with your friends on Facebook or via email and you’re set.

The app will now show you your route on a map together with an estimate of how much time it will take you to get there, depending on whether you’re going with a car, public transportation or by foot. And it’s pretty accurate!

Press Start and you’re off. Now, the friends with whom you’ve shared your trip will receive an email letting them know how far along your route you are. They can choose to either track your progress in the browser or download the En Route! app on their iPhone.

Great for one-on-one meet ups

So if you’re meeting a friend living on the other side of town, En Route! will give you everything you need to let her know if you’ve left already and how far along you are. And that’s great, but if you have to keep track of more than one route, that is, you’re meeting a couple of friends, then En Route! lacks a bit of usability. The app is great still and it works without flaws, no worries there!

But that’s actually the one thing that I think is missing from the app: the ability to see more than one route on the same map. Imagine that you’re meeting four or five other friends, all coming from different directions. They’ve all shared their routes with you, but you have to switch between four or five identical maps with different routes to see them. If there was a way to gather all these trips into just one map and have different-colored lines for each route, then En Route! will be way en route towards becoming a must-have for anyone with an iPhone and an active social life (and I do mean real-life social life, not Facebook or Twitter social-life).

Until then, En Route is a great application that I highly recommend, especially because it doesn’t force the others that you share your route with to have En Route! to see your trip and progress. Thumbs up!

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