One of the things that I found odd on the iPhone was the inability to use Google Maps to plot a route to a locations directly from the calendar. Consider how easy Apple have made almost everything else on the iPhone, it seemed to be a rather odd omission. You can easily navigate to an address or dial a number out of an email, but why not the calendar?
This evening however I found a rather neat trick that manages to get around this problem with almost no fuss whatsoever. Take this calendar item I have for tomorrow (well, today really). I’m getting my car serviced, and put the address of the place I’m taking the car into the “Location” field in the calendar item as you’d expect.
Since I wanted to be able to copy that address easily into Google Maps (whilst leaving the company name in the Location) I decided to put it into the notes field.
Imagine my surprise when I noticed the address and phone number both turned blue and became underlined, like hyperlinks. Upon tapping on the phone number, I was prompted to dial it!
Even better than this however is what happened when I tapped the address:
Immediately Google Maps whizzed to the surface with a push pin firmly on top of my impending destination.
No more having to copy and paste an address out of the calendar, just pop it into notes instead and tap away! Obviously this feature has been in there for some time, but for those of you who didn’t know about it, there you have it. A simple way of getting Google Maps to play nice with your calendar items, no fuss required.
Just use this app, which does what Calender should do: