Arno Manders

Not so long ago I saw a nice menu from (I’m not really sure) a game console on TV. It had a tilted view on 3D planes with information from a games and after selecting a plane the plane rotate toward the camera so you could see more detail from the selected game. I made something like that with flickr pictures. You can navigate by using the arrow keys. For now I limited the search result to 29 pictures to prevent a crash from the browser.

Visit flickr photo viewer  (warning CPU heavy)

I had the idea to make it so you can browse infinite  through the photos but sadly that is getting to heavy for the CPU.  In the future I will try other effects (for example create the tiles only in one direction) to achieve the infinite browsing idea.

A few weeks ago I was busy finding a graduate project. And during that time augmented reality looked very interesting. Most of you know what it means, for the others here a small explaining line from wikipedia: Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.

"it's amazing, it's the new Lego"

I’m not going deeper into this subject I only made this post to show some of the cool examples:

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After the Flash Google maps API release I spend some time to see what is possible. I started with the documentation from Google. In there documentation they are using the latitude and longitude coordinates to set the center of your map. This is not really a human readable way to do it and personally I never used the latitude and longitude coordinates to find a city or street in Google Maps. That is why I started searching for a way to center the map with an address.

I build a small application with source-code available in Flex that is using this technique. In the left upper corner you can search your own address. I use ClientGeocoder to search for the address but the problem i’m running in to is that you can’t run it local because he returns this error.

Warning: Domain maps.googleapis.com does not explicitly specify a
meta-policy, but Content-Type of policy file
http://maps.googleapis.com/mapsapi/crossdomain.xml is
'text/x-cross-domain-policy'.  Applying meta-policy 'by-content-type'.

You can’t use ClientGeocoder crossdomain. You should call it from a domain that has a registered Google Maps API key in my case “http://blog.arnomanders.nl”.

Introduction
Last week A month ago Gerard Lolkema had a lot of trouble getting Google Maps working in Ruby on rails so he asked me for help.

Gerard Lolkema already found a tutorial to do this. The tutorial: Rails, Geocoding, and Google Maps from Andre on Tech. This tutorial provides you of a lot of code that is direct usable but because we make a dutch website we need to display addresses from The Netherlands. This functionality is not in the code (and probably not in the plugin) of Andre on Tech. He is using a web service from an other website to get the longitude and latitude from an address, but the problem is that it is only possible to send US addresses. To find that problem took us half a day.

Finally we found an alternative to put Google Maps in our website. And this is how we did it.

Put Google Maps in your webpage
First you need a Google Maps API Key

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Is Google launching a new competitor for Facebook or is it something completely new? And OpenSocial, what is that?

Well it is definitely not a competitor for Facebook. Google is not opening a new community website where you can share things with your friends. OpenSocial more a set of tools (API’s) for developers to create applications that will work on a lot of community websites.

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