Hackszine.com: Google Maps Archives

Archive: Google Maps

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August 2, 2007

HOWTO: use latitude and longitude with Google Maps

Whether you want to quickly add a waypoint to your GPS, or view a map of a known location, it can often be convenient to use real latitude and longitude values with Google Maps instead of dealing with street addresses.

Rerieving a map for a lat/lon value is simple enough with Google Maps. You can simply enter the decimal latitude and longitude into the search form instead of a street address.

However, if you're viewing a map and you want to retrieve the lat/lon location, there unfortunately isn't a convenient "get latitude and longitude" button. Google Maps deals with latitude and longitude locations internally, though, so with this little snippet of javascript, you can easily get the job done:

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter())

This will return the coordinates of the map's center point. You might want to double-click a position on the map before running the above code. Doing so will reposition that point to the center of the map automatically.

Get Latitude and Longitude values from Google Maps - [via] Link

June 28, 2007

Multi-hop Routes in Google Maps

The ability to create multiple-hop routes was recently added to Google Maps. Not only does this let you plan a trip to New York by way of San Francisco and Tampa Florida, but you can also use the feature to adjust a more conventional route. You might do this to manually avoid road construction or traffic jams that you know about.

To use the feature, you simply drag a point on the blue line to another position. The map will automatically compute a new route that crosses through the new position.

You can make use of this functionality from the standard map APIs as well. Before, start and destination addresses were specified by the saddr and daddr parameters:

http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=start+address&daddr=destination+address

With multiple hops, you just encode all the hops into the destination address, seperated by "to:". For example, "destination1 to:destination2 to:final destination":

http://maps.google.com/maps? saddr=minneapolis%2C+mn& daddr=san+francisco%2C+ca+ to%3Atampa%2C+fl+ to%3Anew+york%2C+new+york

Link.

June 17, 2007

Removing yourself from Street View

Threat Level recently ran a story about Kevin Bankston, the EFF attorney who decided to test the take-down procedure for privacy-infringing photos within Google's Street View. Initially, Google required a wealth of information before removing the photo, but they changed their policy, requiring only your name and the location the image was taken. Kevin submitted the information, and the photo was promptly taken down.

If you've found an image of yourself cruising around town when you were supposed to be at home with a fever, here's what you do:

View the privacy-infringing image in Street View
Click the "Street View Help" link
Click the "report inappropriate image" link and fill out the details

Presumably, once you've done this, Google will contact you via email and you'll have to reply with your name and a confirmation that you're the person in the image.

Here's the rub, though: if someone else already caught you playing hooky, there's no point in removing the image anymore. Effectively, you'll need to find any compromising images before anyone else does.

There's also a second problem. You may need to report more than one image. Kevin may have had his reported image removed from the database, but I found him again just up the street.

Want Off Street View? Details and discussion at Threat Level - Link

May 29, 2007

Google Maps Street View

Google launched the Street View feature in Google Maps today at the Where 2.0 conference. For select cities, you can now view street-level panoramic photography as you browse around a map location. It's like being able to take a virtual driving tour of a city, right from your desk.

There is a little minifig that you can drag around the map. When you release it, a small flash application is overlayed above the map which displays the panoramic photo for that location. Greg Sadetsky used the freeware ActionScript decompiler, Flare, to investigate the viewer's source. If you curious about how the viewer works, that might be a good place to start - [via] Link.

Fabian K. notes that Google has been using GeoIP lookups quite frequently to restrict beta features to specific locales and the street view feature is no exception. If you are outside the US, you can enable street view by adding a &gl=us to the end of the maps.google.com url. You'll still only be able to view the handful of cities that have pano-image data, but you can at least get a glipse for what's coming - Link.

May 20, 2007

Cross country motorcycle map mashup

Ryan from 5Pears.org stopped by the Hacks booth at the Maker Faire yesterday. He's been traveling for the last 50 days across the country on his bike, using his phone and a GPS to automatically update a map which details the route he's taken, where he is, and where he's stopped for things like gas and food.

When you're on the road that long and mapping your adventure in real-time, there's a bit of a security need that needs to be considered. Ryan wanted to let his friends and family know where he is, but he didn't exactly want to give out information about where he is currently camping. His solution was to have the PHP script that runs his site monitor his location for movement. If he's been staying within the the same general location, the data won't be plotted to the map until he's moved somewhere else.

5 Pears travel blog - Link.

May 8, 2007

Send a Mother's Day GeoGreeting

Fans of Jesse Vig's GeoGreeting (profiled here for Valentine's Day) might want to check back in to send a Mother's Day greeting on Sunday. Jesse wrote in to let us know that

somebody found a building with a really cool flower design, so I added a temporary flower emoticon in honor of Mother's Day.

A sweet touch for geeky moms (or loving mothers of geeky offspring) anywhere.

Here's that building in its geographical context, San Antonio, Texas:

March 13, 2007

Use Google Earth as GPS

Google GPS

In the latest installment of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools, Alexander Rose shows how to use Google Earth to provide cost-effective GPS mapping in real time:

I have been doing a lot of exploring and surveying in the desert recently, and have been trying to find the right GPS mapping solution. The solution I found incorporated stuff I already had (laptop and GPS) with the help of some excellent, nearly free software. The best part is that it works even better than the $900 in-car GPS solutions as it uses always up-to-date satellite data, and is easily sharable.

Basically you run Google Earth and use some great donation-ware to link it in real time to a GPS. This means that your mapping software and maps worldwide are not only free, but you also get hi-res satellite views and in some cases 3D buildings (in downtown areas).

The trick of this hack is getting Google Earth to work offline, when you're disconnected from the Internet, by updating the cache for your destination before you leave. Alexander's favorite part if his setup allows him to save a route and share it with others. Check out his post for complete software, hardware, and connection details.

Related:

March 8, 2007

Get Google Earth Resolution in Google Maps

Google Maps Zoom of FOO Camp

At Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen has a great Google Maps hack to overclock the resolution of Google Maps, bumping any location up to the resolution available in Google Earth, simply by tweaking the URL:

Select a location and switch to satellite view
Zoom in as far as you can, and click "link to this page" at the top right
Now replace the "z" parameter in the URL with a higher value, e.g. 20, 22, or 23, and wait. Some locations will now show more detailed imagery

During last year's FOO Camp, Google flew over O'Reilly's Sebastopol campus to get some high-rez shots of the event. They added these shots to Google Maps this past January, but the resolution was much higher in Google Earth. With this hack, you can get the same resolution in Google Maps that's been available in Google Earth for a while.

So, if you surf over to 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 (with the z parameter set to 22), here's what you'll see, right down to the "Welcome to FOO Camp" sign:

Google Maps Zoom of FOO Camp

That's me in the khaki pants. I'm having a great conversation with Natalie Zee Drieu and Doria Fan.

(via Lifehacker)

Related:

Google Maps Hacks

March 1, 2007

Google Maps Traffic Status

Google Maps has added traffic information for more than 30 U.S. cities.

If available in your area, real-time traffic conditions will be displayed over the highway as color coded lines. Each color represents how fast the traffic is moving:
Green: more than 50 miles per hour
Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
Red: less than 25 miles per hour
Gray: no data currently available

Now if we can just find a way to scrape that information and automate a traffic status feed for a specified route. Any ideas? Please share 'em in the comments. [via] - Link

Related:

Google Maps Hacks

February 14, 2007

Send a Valentine's Day GeoGreeting

GeoGreeting Valentine

For anyone looking for a last-minute Valentine to send instantly, Google Maps Mania advises heading over to GeoGreeting.com:

a virtual greeting site that lets you send a message to others on the web using buildings that are in the shape of letters and punctuation. In this recent tv news piece where GeoGreeting's creator Jesse Vig was profiled he put out a call to help find a heart shaped building in time for the anticipated traffic rush to his site for Valentine's Day.

Vig eventually found his heart shape in Turkljaca, Croatia Island:

GeoGreeting Heart

The heart shape is as quick and easy to insert as any letter, so get to GeoGreeting.com to send your personalized message before everyone else does.

Related:

Google Maps Hacks

February 3, 2007

Simple Zip Code Geocoding

The ability to geocode, or translate into latitude and longitude, postal codes is a fairly useful hack to have in your programming toolbox. Quick and dirty zip geocoding allows you to do some neat things fairly efficiently and with a minimal amount of code. Though it's U.S. centric, it allows you to add location-based functionality to your apps without requiring any real personal information to be transfered or stored.

If your application only needs to convert a zip code (or any address) into a lat/lon coordinate, say for simple mapping purposes, the easiest solution is to use the Google Maps Geocoding API. In addition to the client-side javascript functionality, you can directly query the geocoding system from php using an http request like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=12345&output=xml&key=yourkeyhere

Just change 12345 to the zip (or any address) that you are looking up, and "yourkeyhere" should be your Google Map API key, which you can obtain here. Developer.com has a good PHP example for making use of the returned XML in your server-side code.

Often times, it's useful to be able to do zip lookups based on a geographic region. Maybe you want a list of all zip codes within a certain radius or bounding box. Applications for this could include clustering map items that are near eachother, or searching a database for items that are nearest to a given location. For this, it's really nice to have a MySQL table that contains zip codes along with their lat/lon coordinates. Fortunately, several people have compiled this sort of information from public domain data, and you can even download a full MySQL table dump here, for free.

At this point, it's a pretty simple matter to query the database for location-based information. For instance, let's say you have a web site with a guestbook that allows guests to leave their name and zip. You could easily whip up an application that tells your guests how many other guests are in their area by using a basic bounding box with a query like this:

SELECT guest.name from guest, zipcode WHERE guest.zip = zipcode.zip AND zipcode.lat < [maxlat] AND zipcode.lat > [minlat] AND zipcode.lng < [maxlng] AND zipcode.lng > [minlng]

These are just a few ideas, but hopefully this should be enough to get you started. If you have some good ideas for other geocoding applications (or any mapping/gis hacks in general), please give us a shout in the comments.

January 29, 2007

Map Your Books

Google Maps Books

The folks at Google have answered a great rhetorical question with an even better internal mashup of Google Books Search and Google Maps:

So why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. When our automatic techniques determine that there are a good number of quality locations from a book to show you, you'll find a map on the "About this book" page.

Though the service works for any books available in Google Book Search, it's much more interesting for novels or narrative nonfiction than with technical books like this one. Perhaps it will finally help me find my way around War and Peace, though what I really need for that book is a character map.

Related:

January 24, 2007

Chart Your Route with Virtual Pedometers

WalkRunJog

To prepare routes of varying lengths while training for her first marathon, The Marathon Mama (a.k.a. Kristina Pinto, my wife) used to simply drive from the house and clock distances using her car's trip odometer. But training for her second marathon, this time as a mother, she began to realize:

It can get tedious to drive around with a toddler in the back seat asking, "Where we going?" as we pass our house several times to measure various routes. Besides, I often forget the mileage of my routes.

In the past, she'd used a rolling "pen" to calculate mileage on a printed map (the roller increments as it rolls along the route, with calculations needing to be made for scale), but she always doubted its accuracy. Thankfully, her training partners (she'll be running the Boston Marathon for charity, as part of the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge) turned her on to some much more efficient and practical solutions, provided by third-party Google Maps mashups:

For city runners who jog on a lot of one-way streets, or any of you who walk or run and are looking to chart out the mileage on a new route: you don't need to get in your car to clock the miles anymore. There are several free websites that will help you out and determine the miles of a path anywhere in the country.
You can calculate your own route or check out other people's preferred paths at WalkJogRun.

Another DFMC runner recommended Gmaps Pedometer, which offers similar services.

She concludes, "Now you don't have to get off your seat to count your miles, but you still have to get off the chair to actually run them."

Related: