[ANN] Google Maps Hacks

[Ben Giddings]

In the spirit of "Release Early, Release Often", I want to provide my
Google Maps Hacks files and see if anybody can do anything
interesting with them:

http://rubyforge.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/googlemapshacks/?
cvsroot=googlemapshacks

I wanted to do this so I could create my own custom highlighted
routes on maps. Google Maps is great, but although it marks major
roads, it doesn't mark bike routes. I have other maps that show that
info, but Google Maps is much more convenient sometimes. What I
wanted was a way to mark the bike routes on a Google map.

So, here's what I have. I can create an XML file that contains a
"polyline" element. This draws a blue line on the map like the one
you can get when you ask for directions. The process for getting the
line on the map is horribly convoluted, but it works, and the
coordinate encoding system seems to work pretty well too. I'm hoping
that maybe someone else will feel inspired by this and want to make
the process much more useful.

The files in CVS are in a pretty well commented, pretty useful
state. Like I said, the process is awful now, but pretty well
documented in the comments for coords.rb.

Enjoy!

Ben

[Ara.T.Howard]

this sounds awesome! i've been doing this by hand ;-)

-a
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[Michael Campbell]

On 6/20/05, Ben Giddings <bg-ru...@infofiend.com> wrote:
> In the spirit of "Release Early, Release Often", I want to provide my
> Google Maps Hacks files and see if anybody can do anything
> interesting with them:
>
> http://rubyforge.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/googlemapshacks/?
> cvsroot=googlemapshacks

Or... http://tinyurl.com/bu4y6

[Ben Giddings]

On Monday 20 June 2005 10:16, Ara.T.Howard wrote:
> this sounds awesome! i've been doing this by hand ;-)

There's a proof-of-concept out there for really interesting maps using the
"paths" in interesting ways:

http://www.chicagocrime.org/zipcodes/60617/

Adding the map locations wouldn't be too difficult, but I think there's
still a lot of work to do to get really good paths.

Anyhow, any contributions you can make to the effort would be great. I'll
give anybody who wants it CVS access.

All I want, in the end, is a map with my bike paths highlighted. :)

Ben