Google Map Rolling on a Mac

I love "silly" demos that combine technologies. Raul Guiu has written a very small app that uses the Mac's motion sensor to navigate around Google Maps. Now my first thought was "nice demo, can't see an application" then I started playing "follow the roads" which was fun for a short period of time. Now however I can think of quite a few bits where adding in motion and GPS could really commoditise certain areas. Take the "Fitness Watch" market, it costs £100-£200 for a watch and the "premium" ones are those with GPS. Now however with my iPhone I already have a GPS but I need to combine the information. The motion sensor could also act as a pedometer as well as indicating on a bike how fast I am going and what sort of lean I got into the corners.

This sort of "personal network" approach (which runs against the "one central device" theory) would give me all of the information I need (and more) and do so over a very limited area (I have them on me, if I don't then they aren't involved).

Its something that I expect we will see more of as things like the iPod/Nike link up are expanded and players like Polar want to get into the act. The key here will be around the short network comms and not burning the battery to get that done.

So yes its just using a Mac to navigate a Map, but it does go to show that not all Mashups have to be of web information. Mashing up personal information in a localised way can be just as, if not more, useful.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Google Mapplet of the Carbon Counter...

Okay now that was ridiculously easy.... about 30 mins of work while doing my expenses (in other words the 30 mins that kept me sane through the process) and I'd turned the Maps piece into a mapplet piece, which is nice. For those that don't know the "Mapplet" piece is one of the two big releases from Google this week, the other being the truly amazing "Street View".

Anyway a quick bit of hacking around and thanks to having the backend reasonably well done up popped the mapplet
All this takes is a simple Carbon Counter Mapplet XML file. Feel free to give it a go.

Technorati Tags: Google, Mapplet

Creating a KMZ from KML in Java using Zip

This is a very quick post just because I didn't find something when searching that did exactly what I wanted.

Scenario: I have an XML doc (that I have converted to a String) which represents the KML file and I want to return a Zipped version of that file to save on bandwidth and the like. First of all you need to have somewhere to get the KML file from (in this case counter.getKML().

 response.setContentType("application/vnd.google-earth.kmz");
 ZipEntry entry = new ZipEntry("geoblog.kml");
 ZipOutputStream zipOutputStream = new ZipOutputStream(response.getOutputStream());
 zipOutputStream.setLevel(9);
 zipOutputStream.putNextEntry(entry);
 zipOutputStream.write(counter.getKML().getBytes("UTF-8"));
 zipOutputStream.closeEntry();
 zipOutputStream.close();

And that is it. Mind bogglingly simple.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture