One of the main problems with iPhone applications is that they cannot run in the background. This has been very impractical for some of the location-aware applications: while it doesn't matter if you are searching a nearby restaurant, it is a bigger problem for social applications that tend to display were your friends were a while ago and not where your friends are now.
Navizon has found a way to overcome this problem. If you have a jailbroken iPhone, it is now possible to tell the application that you want it to run all the time, even if you are doing other things with your iPhone.
Thanks to this feature, you can:
- See your friends’ location in real time with the Buddy Finder
- Send a notification (or Navizon Alert) each time on of your buddies enter an area of interest. For example, I have it configured so that I receive an email each time my kids gets to school or when my in-laws make an impromptu visit at home.
Application developers can also benefit from this feature thanks to the FireEagle interface offered by Navizon: just let Navizon update the iPhone’s location in the background and read this location from FirEagle.
Last but not least, this version of Navizon includes MobiFindr also known as Locate-by-SMS, a feature that has been extremely popular in previous versions of Navizon. If you want to read your position remotely while conserving the battery life, just enable this service on your iPhone. It will let you obtain your iPhone’s location by sending a text message with the passphrase of your choice. This is very useful if you happen to lose your iPhone and want to find where in the world you left it. Here's a video that explains it in more details:
This new version of Navizon will work on Jailbroken iPhones and is available in Cydia. It should be in the repositories that come with Cydia (just search for Navizon) but if it is not, just add http://cydia.navizon.com as a new source and find it in the Navizon category.
