New Toy
Thursday, March 15th, 2007I have been trying to think of a good reason to play with the newly released Google Maps API, but I couldn’t motivate myself to sit down and learn it without a project in mind. I actually have some “kind of good” projects that I COULD do, but nothing too neat.
Nothing too neat until my brother called a few days ago and asked if I could do something for him. He works for the Coast Guard on a buoy tender. They have a hundred (or so) channel markers (buoys) that they take care of. Right now they keep the data on them in an Excel “spreadsheet”, which can be rather tedious. He asked for a way to put them on a map and display info on whatever one is clicked. My moment had arrived! His request was screaming for a Google Map implementation.
I took his spreadsheet converted the relevant information into an xml file. Then I made a little Java/HTML page to display the dang thing on a browser. Only hitch I ran into was making the sidebar load properly in Internet Explorer. For whatever reason the Coast Guard won’t let people install Firefox… whatever. What I should have done was make a two column CSS layout. But I didn’t. I’m stubborn. It SHOULD work with tables in an elegant fashion (in both IE and Firefox at the same time). I spent hours fiddling with different “overflow” options, and IE just never worked right (without making it not work in Firefox). As an interim fix, I think I’ll make a drop-down box style page. I’d be happy to hear anyone’s work around on the IE table overflow issue though.
In the mean time… this is what I have so far:
- USCGC’s Buoy Map Thing for Firefox
- USCGC’s Buoy Map Thing for IE
- USCGC’s Buoy Map Thing as a drop down wussy compromise. (actually I think this looks better, but I couldn’t get it how I ORIGINALLY intended)
My friend Gary gave me a good idea for a “friend monitor”. It’d be easy to make a site just like the above that keeps track of people with whom we are cool. I can’t think of any particularly good uses for the thing… would just be neat. Especially if everyone had a personalized icon.
ANYWAY… say what you will about Google mining all of our personal data. They are giving us some fun free functional toys to play with.
UPDATE: 03 April 2007. I was asked if I could make the markers appear as their appropriate color (usually red or blue but some are striped). This was a relatively easy task with the API. I had to add a “color” field to the xml data and draw the funny striped “buoys”. The result is here.