MapQuest Devblog

Continuing our string of weekly trade show announcements, we'd like to let you know that MapQuest is a Platinum Sponsor of and will be attending the annual Where 2.0 Conference being held next week in Burlingame, CA from May 12^th to the 14^th. (For those of you not familiar with the Valley, the show is right outside the San Francisco Airport.)

If you're attending the show, stop by and tell us what you're working on and how MapQuest can help.

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. - Carson McCullers

In Part 1 I showed you how to get started with the MapQuest Advantage API by getting a developer key. In Part 2 I put that key to use by providing access to a basic map in the Map It! widget. Part 3 showed you how to incorporate basic geocoding. In Part 4 I discussed more advanced geocoding topics - including handling multiple matches and specifying geocode search options. Part 5 discussed adding widget options including the default zoom level, specifying point of interest icons, and the default map type. Part 6 discussed how to add direction capabilities to the widget. In this final installment I'll talk about how easy it is to integrate address searching with the Mac OS X Address Book application.

Address Book Searching

The Mac OS X Address Book application is bundled with the OS X operating system, providing a way for users to organize their contacts and associated information including their addresses. Also included with Mac OS X is an Address Book widget, which provides access to the Address Book database from a widget. I've explored the Address Book widget code, and extracted the AddressBookPlugIn. Plug-ins are native code that can be used to access operating system levels features from a widget's JavaScript interface.

In this post I will continue my discussion of overlays in the MapQuest JavaScript API 5.2. My last two posts covered a couple of methods for adding rollover functionality to overlays. Over the next couple of posts I will discuss some of the options that are available when working with image overlays.

There are a few things that set image overlays apart from the other overlay types. The one that poses the biggest obstacle is image resolution. Since an image overlay is "pinned" to a map with Lat and Lng coordinates, there is a significant difference in resolution required to display an image properly at different zoom levels. If this becomes an issue for your application, one of the options that is available is the setImageOverlayLevels method provided by the API.

MapQuest will be in attendance at JavaOne being held next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. You can visit us in the Pavilion at booth #1124; a number of the MapQuest Developers will also be running around and attending sessions. Feel free to stop and talk with us.

Stand in the place where you live, Now face North, Think about direction, Wonder why you haven't before - REM

In Part 1 I showed you how to get started with the MapQuest Advantage API by getting a developer key. In Part 2 I put that key to use by providing access to a basic map in the Map It! widget. Part 3 showed you how to incorporate basic geocoding. In Part 4 I discussed more advanced geocoding topics - including handling multiple matches and specifying geocode search options. Part 5 discussed adding widget options including the default zoom level, specifying point of interest icons, and the default map type. In this installment I'll discuss how to add direction capabilities to the widget!

Directions

Listing 1 demonstrates how to add directions to our widget map. I've added an additional search box where the user can enter the destination address. I've use the Java application developed in Part 3 to obtain the coordinates of the route beginning and destination points. Using the coordinates, I've created the MQGeoAddress object for both points. A new session is created for routing. The starting point and destination are added to the way points. Once the route is calculated through the doRoute method, the highlighted route is added to then added to the map.

Ok, I was driving (very carefully, mind you) on a very sunny afternoon to the airport, and I got a call from my very bright and brilliant niece who recently enrolled into Michigan State University (MSU if you're a Michigan native). During the midpoint of the conversation, all I heard was "cell phone silence", for lack of a better term, and within a few more seconds the call was dropped -- argh!

Obviously, I'm not the only person in the world who gets aggravated when a mobile call gets dropped. Of course, my wireless carrier has to go unnamed here in order to protect the guilty... er, uh... innocent.

So, after I called my niece to finish our conversation, I started to think. "Shouldn't there a way to show folks where the various dead spots are for the wireless carriers?" As you will see shortly, the MapQuest 5.2 APIs actually come in quite handy for solving this sort of problem. If you read my previous blog post and tried out the example code that I provided, then you should be familiar with the concept of creating a POI (point of interest) on a map and displaying it. Today, we're going to use overlays to highlight a region of interest. Take a look at the image below to see my "dead spot" awareness system:

MapQuest will be out in Santa Clara, CA this week attending the Location Intelligence conference. We have a booth set-up and will be happy to demo and discuss the MapQuest Platform with you.

Hope to see you there!

Developer David Bello has written a great plug-in for AIM called "Share-a-Map." That clever name may have something to do with why we're covering it here.

Right from the copy in the AIM Gallery:

Share-a-map is an AOL AIM plugin that let you share maps with a friend via AIM in an interactive way. This plugin can be extremely useful when you want to share a location, route or place with a friend or relative, plus other features like add images and hand drawing overlays, find an address or point, save your map, among others.

We've been playing with it here in the office and it is a really sweet way to do some map collaboration.

The Share-a-Map plug-in is Windows only and available in the AIM Plugin Gallery.

In my previous MapQuest posts I've mostly been demonstrating how to use MapQuest to display the the various types of geo-formats (KML, GeoRSS, etc). Building on the examples of map event interaction from my previous posts, we can also build an interactive map interface where users can build their own geo-format files. Here's an example where users can interactively click on the map to create a polyline.

This method, although similar to the method I covered in my last post, uses the InfoWindow of the map rather than a rollover associated with a Point Of Interest (POI). The InfoWindow is populated with the title and content when the overlay is moused-over, and follows the cursor, similar to a tooltip.

The biggest disadvantage with this method comes from the need to step outside of the API to attach a mousemove event. This means that the solution needs to take browser differences into consideration. In order to simplify the code, and because I generally use ASP.NET for most of my work, you will notice that I have utilized a few shortcuts provided by the Microsoft AJAX Library.