wanderingken.com

In a previous post I described how to cobbled together a Telus Motorola iDen phone and mologogo in order to make a live tracker, pointing folks to the the map at the top of the right-hand column in this blog. (Haven’t seen it? Look there now.)

At the time I posted the map, I felt it rather small and uninformative, but no one complained. That is, until last week, when a friend (thanks, Jesse) proceeded to give me the gears over not being able to `see the larger context’ and not being able to switch to satellite mode.

As Jesse had just tapped into one of my own frustrations, I figured I’d better put in the time to make a more interesting map. So…, now, if you click on the tracking map, or follow this link, you can see a full-screen page showing my last reported location. You can also see the direction I was traveling at the time, my traveling speed, and altitude. Additionally, and this is the really cool bit, you can switch between google, yahoo, and microsoft virtual earth maps, enabled by mapstraction, a javascript library designed, and I quote, ‘to hide differences between different mapping APIs’. Mapstraction is currently in the very early stages, and does not attempt to handle polylines, but works very well for maps with simple markers. It is well-designed enough that I needed write only one map loading function, giving a map provider parameter as input.

Check it out!