Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings » Geolocation

Map Service APIs

Dougal — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 13:08:13 +0000

Both Google and Yahoo! have announced APIs for their mapping services. I’ve already gotten a developer key for the Google service. But it doesn’t support address searches, only lat/lon coordinates. So I’m thinking about applying for a Yahoo! key, using their service for geocoding (translating from street addresses to coordinates), then using Google’s mapping interface with all of its Ajaxy goodness.

I don’t know what I plan to actually do with this stuff, or when I’d find time to do it. But dagnabbit, I feel like I should be doing something!

Find cheap gas

Dougal — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:53:38 +0000

What do you get if you combine Google Maps and GasBuddy?

CheapGas.

(via: Make)

Google Sightseeing

Dougal — Wed, 11 May 2005 21:01:01 +0000

Google Sightseeing is an index of interesting sites (sights?) around the world, as seen by the satellites that Google Maps uses. For example, places like The Grand Canyon, Niagra Falls, or the St. Louis Arch.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that the site is running WordPress?

Mobile Wireless

Dougal — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 18:07:24 +0000

Have you ever wished that you could have your own wireless network available, wherever you go? How about a mobile wireless access point, GPS tracking, and a webcam in your car? Would that do the trick?

The EVDO StompBox Project is just such a beast. So, if you’ve got about $700 and some time to blow, you’re all set!

[via: BoingBoing]

GeoURL.org Returns

Dougal — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 22:09:24 +0000

After months (and months, and months) on hiatus, GeoURL.org has returned. The service is now run by Ask BjÃ¸rn Hansen. It appears that it’s been back up for about a week, and they’re still kicking out some kinks. Once the dust settles, we’ll add it back to Ping-O-Matic.

Google Maps Lat/Long Bookmarklet

Dougal — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 19:50:31 +0000

I still haven’t had time to dig into Google Maps enough to make my dynamic GPS coordinate thingy. But here’s a quick bookmarklet that can report the coordinates of the center point of the map currently displayed:

GMap Coords

Just drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar, then click it when you’re viewing a map.

Google Maps Dissected

Dougal — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 21:06:19 +0000

Joel Webber has an excellent dissection of how Google Maps works under the hood in his Mapping Google article. Welcome to my blogroll.

Highlights:

Communication with the backend server is done with a hidden and some javascript trickery (not with XMLHttpRequest, as Gmail uses).
Data arrives from the server in XML and is transformed into HTML by client-side XSLT. This is a bold move, and serves to further demonstrate what can be accomplished in a web browser when you quit obsessing over backwards compatibility.
Overlays (“pushpin” graphics, drop-shadows, driving routes) are done with a combination of transparent GIFs and PNGs.
Routes are displayed as overlays, fetched from the server via a separate “polyline” element.

I wish that I had time to dig into this more. I could think up all sorts of fun hacks, if I only had the time (especially if the polyline data can be decoded). One thing I might actually try on my own is a bookmarklet to get the precise lat/long coordinates of map locations. You can grab the center lat/long coords from the inputs in the hidden iframe, along with the “span” values that define the boundaries of the displayed map. A little algebra and some onmouseover magic can get you the current coordinates for the map location under your mouse pointer in the browser’s status bar.

Must…find…time…

Google Maps

Dougal — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 20:15:15 +0000

This isn’t exactly hot off the presses, but Google has launched Google Maps, which seems pretty nifty, so far. There are a few things I can think of that could use improvement, but it is just a beta, after all.

Improvements I’d like to see:

When listing several locations, it would be nice if you could snap to just one particular one, and elminate the others.
When doing a “local search”, it will change your zoom level, even when you are searching “the map area below”. That’s not doing what I asked, because you’re changing the map area.
The “link this page” link doesn’t always save the current state of the map if you’ve been tinkering (center location, zoom level).
It would be nice to have an easy way to access the latitude and longnitude for points on the map (though I understand that this isn’t of interest to everyone).

On the other hand, the interactive “grab and drag” nature of the maps is great, and the directions with detailed turns are awesome!

Has anybody else spotted any other areas of improvement? Other than obvious ones, like personal settings, that they’re sure to add at some point.

GeoURL Reloaded

Dougal — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 19:59:12 +0000

I just learned about the return of the GeoURL service. Actually, it doesn’t appear to be a re-launch so much as a re-implementation, according to what I read over on Daniel Schaller’s site. It’s pretty sparse right now, so get out there and register your blogs to start finding your neighbors!

(via: Mike Little)

More Mapping Goodness

Dougal — Wed, 08 Jan 2003 16:37:13 +0000

Yesterday was just full of map references. Another cool thing I found out about is the Jabber World Map. If you are a Jabber user, you can register with the map notifier, and your status will show up on the map. You’ll have to email your location name and lat/long coords to the administrator (instructions are at the bottom of the web page, below the map).

I’ll probably hack some Jabber features into my blog one of these days. At the very least, I could easily add a status indicator to show if I’m offline, away, available, etc. I also want to come up with some more ways to cross-pollinate Jabber with FOAF. My JabFoaf project helps get FOAF data out of Jabber. Now I want to do something to get FOAF into Jabber. I’m just not sure exactly how I want to do it, yet.