Beginning Google Maps Applications

Last week, I demonstrated some tools for importing Shapefile data into an SQL database. It’s time to put that stuff to work.
If you’re in a rush, here’s the final demo: translucent state overlays on a Google Map. It’s not the quickest thing in the world, nor is it entirely quirk-free; it exists as an initial […]

There’s a lot of interesting data out there that isn’t points, but regions. In Chapter 10 of the book, we showed you how to calculate an area inside a polygon (see this demo). Unfortunately there just wasn’t the space to cover more region-centric topics. Time to get started on a remedy for that.

Those of you with unlimited data transfer on a supported phone will definitely want to be keeping track of Google Maps Mobile.
It’s particularly cool that GMM now supports a very limited KML. You only get the first nine points in the file, but it does let you see them.
Update: These are screenshots of Google’s online […]

Yesterday, I demonstrated a KML file of Ontario Parks. Although this approach has some fairly serious limitations over a full mashup, the portability and ease of deployment make it an excellent choice in some situations.
In this article, I explain how the techniques used to generate the Ontario Parks KML. These are general-purpose tools that could […]

One of the things mentioned briefly in the book is the KML data format.
I really like KML. It’s an XML standard for representing groups of markers, contents of info bubbles, and geometric paths. It’s intriguing, because it’s all the data of a mashup without the mashup itself: You simply prepare the KML file, enter […]