Simon Willison’s Weblog

FOWA London—Beyond GoogleMaps. Andrew Turner’s talk at FOWA was the most information dense presentation I’ve ever seen, and discussed a huge number of cool geo projects that I’d never previously heard of. Andrew links to the full slides and video, well worth a watch. 17th October 2008, 2:01 pm

Google’s Wikipedia and Panoramio layers are now available in the API. I really like their use of reverse domain style identifiers for the layer IDs: map.addOverlay(new GLayer(“org.wikipedia”)); 2nd October 2008, 11:59 am

Capital Radio’s London Guide. Worth pointing out: the search / map interface on this page is one of the best examples of progressive enhancement I’ve ever seen. Try disabling JavaScript and see what happens. It seems like most developers just can’t be bothered with this kind of attention to detail these days, which disappoints me. 29th August 2008, 1:48 am

MapIconMaker. Extension API that lets you programatically construct a Google Maps bubble marker icon with a custom size, gradient and stroke colour. Under the hood it uses the Google Chart API with the (undocumented?) “mm” chart type. 11th August 2008, 8:48 am

HeatMapAPI (via) Cool (or should that be hot?) API for adding heat maps to any Google Maps application. 19th July 2008, 11:46 pm

Capital FM London Traffic Map. We launched this today at GCap (née Global Radio). I’m particularly impressed with how well the team handled clustering the traffic cameras on the Google map. 27th June 2008, 6:22 pm

Google Maps now shows photos and Wikipedia articles. Click the “More...” button. My first thought was “how do they get so many photo markers on the map?”—Firebug shows that they’re generating tiles on the server containing multiple photo markers, then when you click on one an Ajax call checks which photo is in that particular spot. 14th May 2008, 7:10 pm

KML: A new standard for sharing maps. Google’s KML format, which is already supported by both Microsoft and Yahoo!’s map software, has been accepted under the wing of the Open Geospatial Consortium and is now an international standard. 14th April 2008, 6:36 pm

Google Maps Without the Scripting. Google Maps has finally added a simple API for retrieving static map images. 4th March 2008, 11:54 pm

Google Maps Clusterer. I’ve looked at a few clustering libraries for Google Maps, but this one seems to have the nicest API. 28th January 2008, 3:07 pm

The Art & Science of JavaScript. The JavaScript book I contributed to is now shipping! My chapter describes how to build a Flickr / Google Maps mashup entirely using client-side code (via JSON-P). 12th January 2008, 7:05 pm

Google apps for your newsroom. How the LJ World team use online tools like Google Spreadsheet, Swivel, ManyEyes and Google MyMaps to collaborate with the newsroom and build data-heavy applications even faster. 7th January 2008, 9:24 pm

Encoded Polyline Algorithm Format. Google Maps does some pretty crazy bit mangling to create compressed versions of lat/long pairs. 4th January 2008, 4:12 pm

ExtInfoWindow 1.0: Ajax powered, CSS customization. Finally, a semi-official way of creating customised info windows for the Google Maps API. You lose the default shadow but gain the ability to style the entire info window using CSS. 15th December 2007, 12:22 pm

Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery. My contribution to 24 ways: using Mapstraction to geocode hCards (extracted with jQuery) and plot them on a Google Map. 12th December 2007, 12:28 am

Shadowmaker. Upload a PNG with a transparent background and get back a shadow image suitable for use with the Google Maps API. 10th December 2007, 3:45 pm

OpenStreetMap on the iPhone! Via an ingenious hack. The Google Maps iPhone client caches downloaded tiles using SQLite—to display your own custom tiles, you just need to dump them straight in to the “cache”. 22nd October 2007, 3:30 pm

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. 12th October 2007, 2:14 pm

Google Maps, HTML version. Google’s mostly undocumented accessible version of Google Maps. Robin Christopherson demonstrated this yesterday at FOWA. 4th October 2007, 9:31 am

Brighton geek venues. Nat’s latest project: a neat Google Maps mashup listing venues for geek events in Brighton, managed using Google MyMaps to edit a KML file. 16th August 2007, 1:38 am

Microformats in Google Maps (via) No doubt thanks to the influence of Kevin Marks. 31st July 2007, 11:36 pm

Cross Domain Frame Communication with Fragment Identifiers. Google are using this crazy iframe/fragment trick for their new Mapplets API. 31st May 2007, 2:15 pm

The Google Maps Street View team? They’re posing outside the Googleplex so I’m guessing this is the team that built it. 30th May 2007, 12:29 pm

Howto: Google Maps Street View outside US. Add “&gl=us” at the end of the URL to avoid the evil geo IP restriction and play with Google’s latest toy. 30th May 2007, 7:40 am

The Oxford Guide free WiFi plotted on Google Maps. The guide offers a geocoded Atom feed which can be directly plotted on a Google Map. 26th May 2007, 9:55 am

Introduction and Yahoo! Pipes. The official Google Maps API blog describes how to plot KML output from Yahoo! Pipes. 3rd May 2007, 10 pm

Google My Maps: Bodeans. I’ve been talking about how useful a simple tool for creating custom maps would be for ages... looks like Google beat me to it. Here’s one I created showing the location of Bodeans, an excellent Kansas-style BBQ joint in Soho, London. It’s a shame the URLs suck. 5th April 2007, 5:40 pm

Ekranoplan! Crazy awesome Soviet “ground effect” vehicle, visible in dry dock on Google Maps. 3rd April 2007, 10:04 am

New Open Source Utility Library for the Google Maps API (via) Google are taking a hybrid approach to development on their Maps API—an open source utility library layered on top of their closed source, obfuscated core code. 23rd March 2007, 9:09 pm

My photos tagged “cheese” on a Google Map. You can paste a Flickr GeoRSS feed directly in to the Google Maps query box. 23rd March 2007, 1:55 am

KML and GeoRSS support added to the Google Maps API. Since Flickr can output GeoRSS, this means you can now plot your Flickr photos on a Google Map (if you’re so inclined). 23rd March 2007, 1:03 am

LiveBus.org (via) Brilliant Google Maps mashup in a similar vein to Chicago Crime—displays screen-scraped bus timetable information for Oxfordshire and Surrey in a far more useful format. 10th February 2007, 10:56 pm

Maps released. Google Maps Safari support is being worked on. 8th February 2005, 12:03 pm