iPhone App of the Week – Meetways

I am a frequent user of Craigslist and one of the problems I run into when using Craigslist is finding a safe middle location for myself and the interested customer to meet.  Enter Meetways,  a service which allows you to enter two addresses and receive a list of meeting points in the middle of those two addresses.  For example, say I was located in the Northwest area of town and my customer was in the Southeast area, I can enter our respective locations and Meetways will deliver a list of possible meeting locations.

Meetways has a free web app available as well as a $.99 iPhone app.  Since this is the iPhone app of the week I will focus on the mobile version of the program.  This is one of those apps that you don’t really realize how helpful it is until you come across a time when you need to use it.  If you’re a busy person like me you’d be surprised at how often you will be using this app.  I’ve used this app for finding stores that I need to stop by while on my way to another destination (for example the other day I was on my way to a friends house and needed to stop somewhere to get a card for them, I entered Target into meetways and it found me the closest Target on my route to my friends house).  Oftentimes finding meeting places for gatherings with friends who are just passing through town or are located in different outlying areas can be a difficult task but Meetways makes your planning much easier

The app is fast to load (though loading directions can take a bit longer depending on your connection) and easy to use.  You can save locations (such as home and work) as pins to allow you to access commonly used addresses.  In addition to receiving the list of locations Meetways also provides a map with driving directions (when getting a route you have the option to avoid highways) which can be easily e-mailed to your friends by tapping the “Share with a friend” button in the application.

While I do enjoy this app it definitely hasn’t worked out all of the kinks.  For example, the opening screen can get mucked up sometimes and while all of the buttons work, things look off center and out of place.  Like I mentioned earlier depending on what type of connection you’re using the maps can be slow to load – the Meetways loading screen is a picture of an eyeball looking around the screen, I little creepy to me (could just be personal preference).  Also, I would love if the app saved all addresses that I entered before.  You can do this manually by creating a pin but I don’t always want to enter all of the addresses that I may use as pins.  Other applications have this ability and if Meetways included this it would make their app 10 times easier to use.  Overall though for less than a dollar you can get a great little app that takes the work out of finding that next mutual meeting place between two points.

Do you have this app?  Have a different experience with Meetways?  Agree?  Disagree?  Leave it in the comments.