Girls, do not read this post!

I mean it, you really don’t want to read this!!!

I knew that if I didn’t preface this post with the gender warning, every female reader of kennyandsara.com would make some comment about how much of a geek I am. I really don’t need reminding. However, most the tech-savvy guys out there would appreciate this. So for my remaining male readers and the few women who couldn’t resist at least seeing why they couldn’t read this, let me share with you how my iPod touch got me home.

I got an iPod touch for Christmas and have been loving it. A few days after Christmas we went to Mobile, AL for a short little vacation. On the way home, Sara wanted to travel through a bunch of little beach towns. In addition, I wanted to try a new way from I-10 back to Valdosta. The shortest way from West Florida to Valdosta is by taking some rural roads through north Florida and South Georgia. Since we’d be driving this part at night, I really needed to know where we were going.

Not thinking about our return trip, I didn’t even think to bring a map. So, a few hours before we left, I got on google maps and began taking screen shots of the little towns I would need to navigate through and other places I would have to make a lot of turns. I especially got some screen shots of the rural drive from I-10 to Valdosta. I used a cool little program called hoversnap that allows you to take entire screenshots or to take a marquee tool and select any area on your desktop and it would automatically send that area to a pre-selected folder as a jpeg. I opened hoversnap and told it to save all images to “my pictures.” Then I took google maps and navigated the trickier parts of the trip making screen shots along the way. When I was finished, I plugged my iPod into the laptop and synced it. ITunes automatically syncs “my pictures” to my iPod, so all the screen shots were now on my device. I also opened up google docs and wrote a list of driving instructions and saved it. I then saved that page and turned off my iPod touch.

Unlike the iPhone, the iPod touch only connects to the web via a wireless connection. While driving I wouldn’t have this. Since the iPod touch keeps 6-8 of your last visited web pages in the browser, I could access my directions in google docs. Secondly I could flip through my pictures and see the maps. With the iPod, I could zoom in and out of each image and pan across from map to map. It was awesome! Even when navigating through North Florida, I missed my exit for the rural road heading into Georgia. Fortunately, the screen shot I got of this portion of the trip was large enough, I could navigate from the next exit and found another route through a very desolate and rural area.

Yes, a map would have been easier and an IPhone could have connected to the web and google maps… but I didn’t have either. Instead, I used the extra functionality of my iPod touch!