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.

In order to keep our book a reasonable length, we couldn’t possibly use every neat idea or data source we found as an example. We did use the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Antenna Structure Registration (ASR) database in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Also, in Chapter 11 we used a wide range of street […]

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 […]