MapQuest Developer Network Blog

Location is going to be a very popular topic this year at SXSW Interactive. It's no surprise really. Geolocation features and applications are changing how we interact and consume information. These changes can be seen in the way news stories get reported, location data is visualized in near real-time (like how busy one coffee shop is over another), or something as simple as adjusting your evening plans by figuring out what restaurant your friends are at.

The "Time + Social + Location. What's Next In Mobile Experiences?" panel will be talking about the above topics and more. The panel includes Greg Cypes from AIM, Naveen Selvadurai from foursquare, and I'll be representing MapQuest. We look forward to kicking-off the location-based conversation during the first day of panel discussions.

If you're heading to Austin this week for SXSW, please add us to your schedule. The panel will be in Ballroom "B" on Friday, March 12^th at 5pm.

While you're in town, remember to join us for the MapQuest BBQ Quest at South by Southwest on Sunday to catch a ride out to The Salt Lick for some food and beer on us.

You should also follow MapQuestTech on Twitter. It's our new account focused on development and technology news from MapQuest. It'll also be used to share information on MapQuest happenings and antics on the ground during SXSW Interactive. More on that next week, but trust me, it's worth the follow.

See you in Austin!

Mid-March is almost upon us. For thousands, this time of year means one thing: time to go to Austin, TX for SXSW! MapQuest is no exception. In addition to helping attendees get around Austin and find venues for the Interactive, Film, and Music portions of the conference, we'll have a booth set-up for the Interactive Trade Show. Here, you'll have the opportunity to talk to MapQuest Developers about making your applications location enabled.

Now this last part is important if you're attending SXSW Interactive and love great food:

MapQuest can help you find great BBQ in Austin, but we'd thought we'd also take you to get great BBQ as well -- 23.58 miles outside Austin to Driftwood Texas to be exact.

On Sunday, March 14th, we'll be running buses to take about 150 of our fellow attendees to The Salt Lick for some of the best (in our opinion) BBQ in all of Texas (and quite possibly the world). We'll also be supplying the beer to wash down that NOM-tastic food. While it's worth the wait in line, we've got space reserved so we can get right to the eatin'. Oh, did we mention that we're picking up the tab for everyone?

Pit of meat at The Salt Lick

Mouth's already watering thinking about it, right?

If you want in, here's what you need to know:

MapQuest BBQ Quest at South by Southwest

What?

The Salt Lick BBQ

Free beer on the bus and at The Salt Lick

Free bus ride from downtown Austin to The Salt Lick in Driftwood, TX (and back I suppose)

When? I'm hungry!

Sunday, March 14^th. Meet at 5:30pm. Buses will have you back for evening events by around 8:30pm

Can I go?

You need to be over 21 years of age (bring your ID)

You need to have a 2010 SXSW Interactive, Gold or Platinum Badge

You need to love BBQ

You need to know all the words to "Wheels on the Bus" (Fine! That's optional)

Important: You need to be early. The event is first come, first serve and we're only feeding the folks on the bus. When the buses are full or it turns 6pm (which ever comes first), we're hitting the road. No riding on the roof either (we asked).

Where do I line up?

We will be waiting for you at the Hilton Austin (Right across the street from the Convention Center) located at 500 E. 4th St. Austin, TX

Simply look for the MapQuest Charter Buses.

We look forward to seeing old friends, making new ones, and eating until we collapse.

See you in Austin!

Chris Adamson is a developer and author. His most recent application for the iPhone, named "Road Tip," was just released to the App Store. It's a slick app that performs corridor searches of what's in front of you along your route. So that coffee shop that you past a few miles back? It's smart enough not to show it to you because you're not likely to turn around to visit it.

As a developer, we thought you might also be interested in how Chris came to choose and work with MapQuest instead of using the default mapping and data tools in the iPhone SDK. "The Long and Winding Road Tip" is a very detailed piece on how and why the MapQuest Platform was the best choice for Road Tip.

If you haven't checked out our mapping, directions, traffic, and geocoding APIs, Web Services for your project, visit the MapQuest Developer Network and see how we can help add geolocation features to your desktop or mobile application.

Along with today's relaunch of the MapQuest Developer Network, we're also launching two new products to go with it.

Directions Web Service

First is our new Directions Web Service, which frees you of having to use a language-specific SDK for directions data and provides maximum flexibility in how you integrate those directions into your application.

Features include:

• Basic and Advanced Routing
• Route Matrix
• Draggable Routes

Long URL Web Service

One of the issues with Internet Explorer is that it has a 2048 character limit for URLs. This is problematic for long GET requests, since the URL could be truncated and cause an invalid request.

The Long URL Web Service provides a solution to this by allowing your request to be split up in chunks. We then provide a single response.

Easy to Use

Both of these products kick off our new approach to helping developers. The documentation also contains the working code samples with source code, and all of it lives along-side the service.

More to Come

More Web Services are in the works. Check out the Beta section of the MapQuest Developer Network to try out our Geocoding Web Service and our Static Map Web Service.

DevNet Next

MapQuest is happy to announce the launch of a completely rebuilt and revised MapQuest Developer Network. Our goal is to make it easy for the growing development community to get started with the MapQuest Platform and for experienced developers to find what info they need fast.

What's New

Documentation Made Easy

Our new Web Services and upcoming 6.0 SDKs will have a simpler and concise set of documentation so you can view instructions, variables, samples, and source code all at-a-glance.

Consolidated Application Management

Your applications are now attached to MapQuest My Places. No more tracking multiple sets of credentials for the various MapQuest applications you manage. Access all of your account settings, tools, and resources from one place. If you were a user of our TRC, we've provided an easy way to migrate your accounts.

Reorganized Site; Cleaner Interface

Site content is now organized by product and technology, each with a dedicated forum to discuss topics with other developers. The site also has a cleaner look.

Check It Out

Please give our updated Developer Network a look and let us know what you think.

We've had a lot of excitement this month with multiple launches and cool projects. We wanted to make sure that we also highlight our recently updated JavaScript 6.0 SDK Beta. In the latest build, we've got some great additions to the feature set:

• Overlay support, including CircleOverlay for quickly showing a radius
• Routes can now be run without needing a map
• Wrapper functions for easy access to the Directions Web Service RouteMatrix call

The big new feature this time is support for iPhone/Mobile Safari events such as pinchToZoom. When Mobile Safari is detected, the support module is automatically included, registering touch events.

In a few lines of code, you can also take advantage of the geolocation services in the device and default your map the the user's location.

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(
  function(position) {
    map.setCenter(
      {
        lat:  position.coords.latitude,
        lng:  position.coords.longitude
      }
    );
  }
);

More news and announcements coming soon. Stay tuned.

In addition to auditioning for sitcoms at the studios, MapQuest will be at the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles, October 4th-7th. We'll be talking to developers, showing demos of our MapQuest Platform using the current 5.3 AS3 SDK and our upcoming 6.0 SDK (currently in Beta). My colleague Ant will also be demonstrating his ability to cry on cue for any casting directors in attendance.

We've also partnered with Adobe to power an Interactive Map of the area. The MapQuest-built Adobe Max Locator application will show conference goers nearby restaurants, hotels, conference shuttle locations, and other hot spots near the Los Angeles Convention Center, home to this year's event.

If you're heading to Adobe Max, stop by and say "Hi!" We'll be in Community Pavilion Booth #843, sitting next to you in the Sessions, or in line to audition for the parts of "Guys in Background" for an upcoming episode of "How I Met Your Mother."

In recent weeks we've had a string of updates talking about new services and features we've been working on. Today we've got two new Web Services we're releasing into beta and a feature update for the Beta Directions Web Service.

Geocoding Web Service

We're jazzed to release the Geocoding Web Service into beta. You can now make a simple request containing an address and the service will return a latitude and longitude.

http://platform.beta.mapquest.com/geocode/v1/address
?location=lancaster%20pa
&key=YOUR_KEY_HERE


You can also make a request containing the Latitude and longitude and we'll tell you the address of that location.

http://platform.beta.mapquest.com/geocode/v1/reverse
?lat=40.0378
&lng=-76.305801
&key=YOUR_KEY_HERE


Static Map Web Service

While interactive and draggable maps are useful for many things, sometimes a good ol' single map image is what's needed for your application. While we've made these maps available for well over a decade, you can now build them using our new Static Map Web Service. This allows you to easily create, configure, and return a map image. this includes adding POI icons, traffic data, or shapes to you maps.

This also means you can easily embed a map into any web page without writing or embedding any code. Just insert the map like any other image.

http://platform.beta.mapquest.com/staticmap/v3/getmap
?type=map
&size=400,200
&zoom=7
&center=40.054600,-76.313100
&key=YOUR_KEY_HERE


Directions Web Service

Powered by our new Static Map Web Service, you can now return a static map image for each maneuver of a route narrative. Like on MapQuest.com, this will allow you to show your users a map containing additional detail of the transition to their route.

More information is available on our Developer Network Beta page and included in the MapQuest Platform: Web Services Documentation.

MapQuest is on the road to Austin, Texas - hopefully to speak on panels at SXSW Interactive. Over on our sister blog for MapQuest.com, we've got an overview of the two panels we're stumping for votes:

The Blog Post Where We Solicit for 2010 SXSW Interactive Panel Votes

If you already know how SXSW works and want to jump straight to the voting, here's the panel info:

• Time + Social + Location. What's Next In Mobile Experiences?
  Panelists include experts from:
  • AIM
  • Brightkite
  • FortiusOne / GeoCommons
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Geo
• Social Breadcrumbing - Tying Networks Together by Phone

Thanks for the PanelPicker votes and see you in Austin!

So we have a bonanza of beta and preview updates to share with you. We've been busy making a number of updates to the MapQuest Platform and we've been creating new Web Services and revising our client-side SDKs.

Here's what we've got to show you today:

AS3 SDK 6.0 - NEW!

We're happy to introduce the preview release of our AS3 SDKs, Version 6.0. This rewrite makes the SDK more modular, create smaller final .swfs, and add and improve a number of new features like:

• POI Decluttering Refactored
• Our popular Globe View has been refactored and made a separate component. We've even added a handy feature to let the globe reorient itself when you've turned your world upside-down.
• New Control Component style (Ocean Breeze) to match the ones available on MapQuest.com
• Raster images are now remotely loaded. So your application only pulls in what's needed
• Overview map control added
• Mouse-wheel zoom controls and keyboard controls added
• We've added a vector-based POI star. It's scalable and color-customizable too.

Download and check out samples from our Beta page.

JavaScript SDKs 6.0 - UPDATED!

In this update, we've added:

• Route Options for tailoring your route
• Toggle Route Dragging on and off
• Basic mouse wheel support for zooming

Check out the updated documentation and samples here.

Long URL Web Service - NEW!

Today also marks the introduction of a new service which will allow you to manage large GET requests in Internet Explorer, which can't handle them. While we've put a lot of effort into making our URLs smaller and sane to the human eye, there are still scenarios where a complex request can get pretty beefy. Our new Long URL Web Service will automatically chunk-up the request and still be able to use a JSONP callback in the response.

Directions Web Service - UPDATED!

In our fourth feature release, we've now added draggable routes to the service. You now have the option of adding draggable routes through the Directions Web Service or our JavaScript SDK 6.0.

We've also added a Route Shape feature. This will allow you to return a route shape from a previous request without have to re-run the route.

Even more features and updates are in the works. Stay Tuned.