VUWER geolocation failure and solutions

[Tim Holman]

To all:

In the past two weeks, VUWER geolocation (where VUWER tells you the
latitude and longitude of your Mac) has stopped working. VUWER was
using the free Google Gears API for geolocation purposes, which
allowed any Mac running VUWER to determine its location via WiFi
triangulation.

Unfortunately, Google just shut down the Google Gears API, and now
offers the Google Geolocation API in its place. This new API is "pay
to play", i.e. Google charges you to use it. Consequently, there's no
way VUWER can provide free Google geolocation by default, as I cannot
subsidize geolocation costs for thousands of VUWER users.

All is not lost, however. In the first place, if you are running Lion
or Mountain Lion, Apple already provides free geolocation via the
"Find My Mac" feature in iCloud. All you have to do is activate your
iCloud account on your Mac, and then login to www.icloud.com to track
your laptop. Given this free built-in feature, there is no real need
for VUWER to also provide latitude and longitude data for newer
laptops.

But what if you have an older Mac running an older version of OS X?
There's still hope, because the Google Geolocation API allows any user
to use it up to 100 times a day free of charge. While I cannot
provide a valid API key for thousands of VUWER users, nothing prevents
a user from individually signing up for an API key. 100 geolocation
queries a day is more than ample for any single user, and it will
never cost you a cent.

Within the next two to three weeks, I intend to release a new version
of VUWER to update the geolocation function. As part of the
installation process, you'll be asked for a Google API key if you want
to use Google geolocation directly in VUWER. If you are using OS 10.7
or 10.8, you can ignore the key and rely on Apple's iCloud instead.
As always, VUWER will continue to provide information about the WiFi
networks and the IP address that your laptop is using to connect to
the Internet.

Tim