Psyked: Experiments with HTML5 Geolocation
Your real name is Jason Bourne and at this very moment CIA spy satellites are honing in on your location in an attempt to track you down ...
James Ford has been experimenting with geolocation in HTML5. The result is this rather scary Google Map with an unmanned aerial vehicle type of interface.
The map detects your location (in my case with amazing precision) and then proceeds to load a lot of information about your location. For my UK address the information included the road I live in and my postcode.
I really think it is time that we found out a little more about these Treadstone guys ...
The map includes a distance slider tool that lets you visualise how many people live within different distances of a nuclear power plant. For example, the voluntary evacuation zone around the Fukushima power plant is currently 18 miles. Using the Zeit-Online map we find that a total of 16,040,474 Americans live within 18 miles of a nuclear plant.
You can use the slider to adjust the radius around the nuclear power plants. The number of people living within the radius is then shown. Clicking on a power plant on the map brings up more information about the location in the map sidebar.
Google have added new 45° imagery on Google Maps for Rome.
New bird's eye views have also been added in:
St Louis, MO
Honolulu, HI
New Orleans, LA
Rome, Italy
North Austin, TX
West Norfolk, VA
Scottsdale, AZ
San Rafael, CA
Palm Springs, CA
Lake Forest, CA
Boulder City, NV
Aerial View Map
I've updated my Aerial View map to include some of the amazing sights around Rome captured in Google's new 45° imagery. The map also includes some pretty stunning imagery from Venice, the USA and South Africa.
Google Maps Colorizr
The Styled Maps feature, released in the Google Maps API last year, has proved really popular. It allows map designers to alter the look of Google Maps to match the design of their websites or to emphasise particular map features.
Google's Styled Map Wizard is a great tool for experimenting with and perfecting a style for your Google Map. However the Styled Map function and the Map Wizard both use HSL colors rather than HEX RGB colors, which may be confusing to some users.
The advertising agency stadt.werk has created a new wizard that lets you design your map style in the more familiar HEX RGB colors. The Google Map Colorizr conveniently transfers your HEX RGB colors to the HSL colors used by Google Maps and allows you to cut and paste the code of your finished map style.
The Google Map Colorizr even has a dynamic URL. So if you want to ask someone's opinion about a particluar map style you can send them a link.
The American Civil War Timeline Project
The American Civil War Timeline Project is an interesting attempt to chronologically and geographically map the events of the American Civil War using the open source Simile Timeline. The map includes Wiki style editing so registered users can add geographic/chronological data points to the project.
The site also has two other historical time-line maps:
Parking In Motion’s free iPhone app lets you find, reserve, and pay for parking spots across the US, Canada and Europe and also gives the driver occupancy information in certain locations in real time.
The app has coverage of the US, Canada and Europe with over 20,000 public parking lots enhanced with rates, hours, entrance points, and occupancy information. Using the app it is possible to view on a Google Map all the parking facilities for a location.
Markers on the map show the current occupancy rates at the different parking facilities shown. If you click on a marker you can view details about prices, the opening hours and its phone number.
The app is currently available for the iPhone and Android and Blackberry apps are also in the pipeline.
