These Three Apps Will Actually Enrich Your Outdoor Experiences
Being outdoors is usually a welcome respite from our tech-saturated and media-addicted lives. However, new technologies are meant to be tools, and it makes sense to adopt tools which improve the experiences that we really care about.
As an avid hiker, camper and general outdoors-person, here are three mobile apps that I frequently refer to and find genuinely useful when I am either adventuring, or just out and about on a daily stroll (usually my phone is my my backpack, on low battery, if not airplane mode).
1.PlantNet
This one is great for identifying trees, flowers, fruits and berries. You take a photo of what you are looking at and it uses a machine learning model to match it to the closest photo in its database. For this reason I would not use it to definitively decide if something is edible or not while out foraging . The identifications are probabilistic and user generated, so you get a percentage match. I find it good enough in practice, but there is too much room for error when it comes to plants that could make you sick or dead. That said, it is great for urban walks or strolls in the countryside where you have good cell reception, and it can really enrich your experience of the flora and fauna around your area.
2. Komoot
In general, I’m an old-school paper maps kinda guy. Map apps (maaapppps) simply drain too much battery to be practical for long trips, and are simply less fun and reliable in general. That said, I have found this app to be a life-saver in a number of occasions. Having had AllTrails crash when I needed it the most, this German company specializes in generating routes for hiking, mountain biking and other adventurous travel. The key features for me are the planning tool, and the maps themselves. If I want to quickly get an idea for a route given some waypoints or sites I want to visit, I can put them in a get an estimate of distance, time, elevation etc.
While out on the trail, I have used it to identify smaller tracks that are not on larger scale OS paper maps, which has proved useful when needing to make an unplanned deviation, or emergency evacuation down a mountainside.
3. MagicSeaWeed
This is primarily a surfers’ app, and it does its job well in displaying tide times, wind, and wave quality. However, I find myself regularly checking it while further inland in order to get first and last light times. These are very handy when planning days (and nights) out in nature. There might be better apps for this, but it’s great to have it in an app already on my phone
Bonus: a local weather app
The default iPhone weather app generally sucks. It seems biased to give pessimistic forecasts, which is fine in terms of not catching people out in rain when sun is forecasted, and encouraging you to bring an umbrella wherever you go, but the meaningless percentages make it useless for more detailed planning. I prefer to install a local app for whatever region I’m. These tend to give much more accurate and informative predictions (for example Buienrader in the Netherlands, or the Met Office app in the UK), which is useful for anticipating equipment needs, or if an outing may not be appropriate for some folks given heat or high winds.
Thanks for reading, I hope some of these will prove as useful to you as they do for me. Please comment with any recommendations for apps you find practical and/or enriching when outdoors!
