JasonMorrison.net

I’m a bit of a map geek, and in my youth I spent many hours playing Sim City, so it’s no surprise I was excited to play Monopoly City Streets. The game is a heavily-modified version of the classic board game, played out across the map of the world. You compete with players from all over the planet to buy streets, build properties, and amass as much cash as possible.

The first thing I noticed was that the map display uses Google Maps, but the site actually uses OpenStreetMap data for gameplay. Actually, the first thing I noticed was that their servers were being absolutely crushed by all the people rushing in the play the game, but I digress. OpenStreetMap is a really cool project to build mapping data using the same model as Wikipedia – interested volunteers add and verify data and everything is covered by a Creative Commons License.

(more…)

I’ve recently switched over from my iPhone to an HTC Dream phone running Google’s Android operating system, otherwise known as the G1.  One of the main reasons I switched was because my older iPhone didn’t have a real GPS, and the cell-tower triangulation just didn’t cut it in many parts of the country.

Google just released an app that makes the GPS really useful, called My Tracks.  I’m not the first to write about it, and there’s a pretty thorough review at AndroidGuys, but I thought I’d share my first experience.  This is also an excuse to post more pictures of my cute kid on my supposedly technology-focused blog, since she came along for the walk.

To use My Tracks you’ll need to download it for free from the Android Market. Once you have it installed it’s just a matter of starting up and hitting the menu button and then Record Track.  You can put your phone in your pocket and forget about it while you hike or even surf the web and use other apps – it will keep running in the background.  Multitasking is another advantage that Android has over the iPhone.

Here’s my walk with my internet-famous firstborn:

View Larger Map

It’s fairly accurate, and you can even tell which side of the street I walked on most of the time. Mountain View is no metropolis but walking near tallish buildings downtown did seem to throw it off a bit. I promise I was not staggering from side to side as I walked down Castro Street.

You also get summary data about the duration, traveling speed, and even elevation changes of your trip.

The best thing about My Tracks is that it uses Google Maps and makes it easy to share your route with people. One note – you’ll have the click the little down arrow button on the map screen and choose “Send to Google…” before it shows up in your “My Maps” list in Google Maps. To embed the result in the blog post (like I did above), click the “Link” link in Google Maps and you’ll get code for an iframe.

You can also share some route details with Google Docs but to be honest I was hoping for more data – I’d like to get the point-by-point GPS data so I can use it to automatically geotag photos. I am an obsessive geotagger on Flickr but it’s just too time-consuming to do it manually if the data already exists somewhere. You can access Google Docs spreadsheet data with Python, after all.

Another similar Google product I haven’t signed up for yet is Latitude – I’m not so much worried about privacy as I am unlikely to be traveling around enough for it to be interesting at this point. Athena likes to go for walks but we aren’t roaming too far yet.

Now you can put live results on your own blog, courtesy of Google Gadgets. It’s like Google Maps for the democratic process. Thanks to Wysz for pointing this out.

Firefox 3 is officially out, so go and get it.  Wondering why you should be excited about a new web browser?  Here’s three quick reasons why you should got get Firefox 3 now:

1.  It is much, much faster when it comes to complicated javascript, AJAX, and multiple iframes.  I don’t have any benchmarks on me, but I do some pretty intense stuff with Firefox and the improvement is immediately apparent.  This is very important because even normal web browsing is becoming pretty intensive, from Google Maps to Gmail to normal blogs with 100 widgets plastered on their sidebars.

2.  It’s even easier to manage add-ons and downloads.  The real power of Firefox is the ease of creating and installing extensions, and the interface has been improved making it easier to find new add-ons.  The download manager has been polished as well, which should help end the old “where did that file go” blues.

3.  The smart address bar is very cool.  I almost never have to finish typing urls anymore…  and it gives me immediate feedback on typos as well.  Hopefully this will put a damper on lame business models like typosquatting.

Earlier I wrote about using Photoshop to create a heat map and to use data maps when house hunting.  I got a pretty good response to those tutorials but the process is a little too labor intensive for most.  So when I moved to California, I decided to do something similar, using the Google Maps API, so that it would be easy for anyone to make their own heat map.So here it is:  Localographer – build interactive heat maps for house and apartment hunting.  You can see a screenshot below:Localographer is a beta release right now, so watch out for bugs and random downtime.  Also, I have to add a disclaimer:  this is not an official Google project, this is something I did on my spare time.  In fact, most of the work was done before I started working at Google in preparation for our move to California.The site takes you though a series of steps to build your map:

1. Pick your city and create your map;
2. Add places you’d like to be near (like your job or your school);
3. Add potential locations (houses, apartments, condos) to see how they compare.

I’ve got a ton of ideas for additional functionality, so hopefully I’ll have time to add more in the next few weeks.  I’ll also be working on the site’s design, making it a bit more usable and interactive.Here’s how a map in Localographer compares to my Photoshop heat map of the Cleveland area (click on the images to see larger versions):   In case you’re interested, the site was developed in PHP with a MySQL database.  The maps use the Google Maps API with some hand-written functions to correctly draw the hot spots.Please take a look and let me know what you think.  Post and problems, bugs, or new feature ideas in the comments below.  Later I’ll post a poll so you can vote on new features and other enhancements.