It wasn’t really until we were leaving London last week that I figured out that I should have installed the London Cycle app, a 3rd party app that scrapes up-to-the-minute information about availability of Barclays bikes (aka “Boris bikes”), and provides maps and routing.

Nearly every Londoner (or sometimes Londoner) we met had it installed, but none of the varied insipid “top 25 iPhone apps for London” style SEO bait blog posts mentioned anything like it.

So I’m curious, what applications do you know to navigate your city and get the most out of it? They don’t have to be city specific, I’m just curious what the apps you whip out when exploring, or getting to work, or meeting friends. What’s useful? (and where do you live)

We’re reaching a point where the our cityscapes are almost intractable without augmentation and I know that keying up proper augmentations will become a key piece of my next round of urban travel.

In New York I tend to use only a small set of city specific software (much to my chagrin), and mostly rely on big generic apps (in which NYC tends to be well represented)

To navigate New York I use: