People are going wild over Google Maps, but I honestly didn’t get too excited about it until I saw Glen Murphy’s Movin Gmap project. It’s a Python script that reads location data from a connected GPS and pans the Gmap to follow. Upon seeing this hack of Gmaps, I went looking for more. Hack a Day shows us how to get maps for a set of decimal coordinates from both Terraserver and Gmap (Terrabrowser will do some of this for MacOS X).The folks over at libgmail found themselves enamored of Gmaps too, and posted a page of hacks. And, before I knew it, I stumbled across a Keyhole BBS discussion of how to find the latitude and longitude of a ‘place’ without a GPS handy. The answer comes from Lat-Long.com, a browsable and searchable database of locations of many types across the US.
Update: The Maps API is out.
