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Google Geo News

This post started with Ryan sending me this link demonstrating a KML overlay of county borders of his bifurcated state in Google Maps.

Then I found this Roundup of Google’s Geo Developer Day (btw, I so wanted to be at Where 2.0) with tales of the new geocoding feature of the Google Maps API, more details about KML-in-Google-Maps, geotagging in Picasa, and the new Google Earth 4.0 beta.

And somewhere along the line, I ran across a link to SketchUp, Google’s 3-D modeler that seems built especially to put dimensional structures in Google Earth.

Seattle911

Via the ProgrammableWeb: Seattle911.com. It’s another mashup with Google Maps, but who knew anybody could get 911 data in real time? Sure, it’s only for Seattle, and only their fire/EMS servers (no police), but technology wise, it’s cool. Kudos to Seattle, I guess. What’s my reticence? I don’t know if I should have this data…and […] » about 200 words

bsuite_geocode Plugin For WordPress

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more. My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the […] » about 400 words

Space Shuttle Tracking (and other good uses of the Google Maps API)

Tom Mangan has put the Google Maps API to interesting use with his space shuttle tracking page. Also worth checking out: his Blackbird Spotting site and TLable, a little extension to make pinning/annotating maps even better. blackbird, google maps, map api, space, space shuttle, spacecraft, sr-71, tom mangan » about 100 words

Google Maps Rock, The Google Maps API Rocks More

We don’t need to hack Google Maps anymore. Now that Google has released a public maps API, we can make more reliable map-dependent apps (which will now have better browser compatibility, thank you). Within a few minutes of signing up for a maps API key I had put together the following of the Nevada Test Site Tour.

Yeah, click the satellite button, scroll, zoom… It’s real.

The API is all JavaScript, but I use a bit of PHP to iterate through an array of points and generate the code that puts the lines and pins on the map.

The most frustrating development with the Google Maps API is that each developer key is limited to a certain hostname and directory. It’s sensitive to things like “maisonbisson.com” instead of “maisonbisson.com” or “maisonbisson.com/post/10594” instead of “maisonbisson.com/blog/” . That’s why this is loading in an iframe.

Thanks to The Unofficial Google Weblog for the tip that the API was released yesterday. As a minor coincidence, Yahoo! also released their maps API this week. Damn.