Get Lat Lon. I finally got fed up of hunting around for simple latitude/longitude tools when messing around with mapping APIs, so I built my own with a memorable URL. I plan to add new features as and when I need them.
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Thanks a lot. This is realy helpful. When I was adding alot of locations to a new webapp the last couple of weeks, I thought about this idea, too.
Could you alter the view to make it possible to append a lat, long and high value in the url? This would make it possible to jump to an area pretty fast.
jfroehlich - 12th October 2007 15:27 - #
Much appreciated, thanks. Shocking that it was necessary to build it really, but I have encountered the same frustrations as you.
Yay, this looks very useful :) Enabling scroll-wheel zoom would be good (though not exactly crucial).
Jon Leighton - 12th October 2007 16:05 - #
It'd be handy to be able to single-click to center the map. Took me a few seconds to puzzle out that I was centering the map to pick a location rather than moving the crosshairs; having the map move would've made it plain.
Finally a simple service to do just that \o/. As for features it seems to me that a search would really be handy.
Wow, glad other people have had the same itch! I've enabled the scroll wheel now. I'm thinking about the other feedback - I definitely intend to add geocoding search of some sort.
This feature has always been available on multimap.com, just take a look under the map :)
Colm - 12th October 2007 17:47 - #
(of course the web app is still lovely)
Colm - 12th October 2007 17:58 - #
Wicked. Thanks for sharing!
C.
OK, I've added geocoding search as an undocumented feature. If you add a search term to the page as a query string it will use Google's geocoder to re-center and zoom the map, like so:
http://www.getlatlon.com/?london
I'll add a UI for that some time soon.
Cool - this is a very handy tool. I have a related website that might be of interest to you. It calculates elevations given a file of lat/lon values. a beta version is at www.LatLonToElevation.com
Matt - 12th October 2007 23:21 - #
I'm somewhat confused - what does this do that Google Maps doesn't already do in the 'link to this page' window? It seems kind of overkill to create a whole website to avoid copying and pasting from the URL bar...
If messing around with mapping API's, surely you have fairly simple geocoding tools available to you. eg,
http://developer.multimap.com/API/geocode/1.2/open apidemo?qs=brighton&countryCode=UK
Seems to do the job fairly well for me. :)
Daniel: to be honest pretty much the only thing this gives you over Google Maps is the crosshair. I usually want to centre the maps that I create precisely on a certain point: to do that I need the exact lat/lon pair and the exact zoom level as well. Finding these was just frustrating enough to justify building a custom tool, and since I needed it I figured it could be helpful to others as well, especially if I put it up at a memorable URL.
Seems to me like this is a job for greasemonkey...
Gotta love the stop energy. Especially the "you could solve this by using a non-existent script for a custom extension to a specific browser, so doing it in a simple and fully portable way that doesn't require installation of anything is pointless" variety. Wankers.
Fredrik - 13th October 2007 07:14 - #
Cool.
I've been using FlashEarth.com for this.
Get a cross hair, lat-lon, search, and access too many different map tiles.
Sure, it's flash, not HTML, but it's bloody useful =)
Mark S - 13th October 2007 12:31 - #
Awesome. I would have loved having something like this about a year ago when I was working on a Google Maps-based web app. Nice work, and great URL.
Bernie Zimmermann - 14th October 2007 01:00 - #
What about creating an API for this service?
Henrik Lied - 14th October 2007 12:06 - #
I can't think of a way of building an API around this that would be useful - there's no server-side code at all, in fact the entire site consists of just two files: a static HTML page and a single background image for the crosshair.
Henrik, the API can be found at http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/serv ices.html#Geocoding
Crescent Fresh - 14th October 2007 12:28 - #
There is a problem that when this site gets really, really popular you will exceed the limit of 50.000 geocode request per day. Per day that is!
Berry: the geocode request restriction is per-IP, and since the lookups are done using client-side JavaScript the IP address is that of the user. This means every visitor to the site with a unique IP gets up to 50,000 geocode requests a day, so I don't need to worry about that side of things at all.
I use http://www.informationfreeway.org/ for this since I'm an OpenStreetMap kind of guy. But having the coordinates change on the cursor move means you can't copy+paste, I guess.
Andy: exactly! I had the same problem with a bunch of the other ones I looked at. Another common issue is ones that give you the lat/lon for a marker - the problem being that markers leave the exact point a little ambiguous. That's why I went with a custom crosshair in the center of the page.
Fantastic Simon, just what I need! It's been a real pain finding the lat/long of precise locations (and appropriate zoom levels) for places in Pepys' Diary.
also check:
http://maps.forum.nu/gm_plot.html
It is the best tool I have found for drawing polygons on top of a map and export coordinates by cut&paste or Json...
Lucap - 16th October 2007 09:06 - #
Thanks for this Simon. Yet again you've done the right thing at the right time(for me). Was having the same lat lon frustrations and this helps getting things sorted.
Leon - 24th October 2007 11:16 - #
My site http://www.earthtools.org/ has done all this and more for over a year now!
Jonathan Stott - 25th October 2007 22:26 - #
Jonathan: earthtools is almost what I was looking for, but it doesn't show the Google Maps zoom level (important for making a mashup) and more importantly it doesn't show up when you search for "find latitude longitude" on Google, so I completely missed it when I was looking for a solution (despite having played with your fantastic APIs in the past - I think you've redesigned the homepage since then).
Simon,
I've added a "Google Maps Zoom Level" field on the Location tool: http://www.earthtools.org/map/51.944264879028765/- 1.8896484375/6/5/Map/
Getting to the top of Google's search results is less easy - EarthTools is down at around 13th when I search for "find latitude longitude", but has been slowly rising.
Jonathan Stott - 27th October 2007 11:11 - #
Excellent! A simple, intuitive function. I was struggling to find a speedy way for creating geocodes for various locations on www.beatlesmapped.com - now I'll be able to speed up additions to the site.
andrew pendrick - 13th December 2007 20:07 - #
Hi, brilliant tool. Just adding my +1 to the idea of single-clicking to center the view.
Matt Fletcher - 7th July 2008 12:12 - #