Been an insane year – might be getting back to blogging. Ha…as if.
So I have an idea for a mobile application that uses GPS. Before I invest time in building the real thing I’m going to prototype it on the web using html and javascript. Who knows…maybe that will be good enough to go all the way.
First thing to learn is how to get the phone’s location. Initially I thought this would require real programming (everybody knows real programming is done with a real language like C,C++,C# or Java not one of those baby languages like VB, Javascript or *gag* Python). However, it turns out I was wrong. Those nice people at W3C have already specified that the browser should have this nice geolocation object that offers methods for either getting the location (call once) or watching the position (keeps calling back with the location). Sweet!
Anyway this nice person wrote a decent sample you can look at here. You’ll need to provide two div (output & location) to show information. I killed the geturl stuff and just threw the lat & long on my page. My initial application just needs to know where the phone is, there isn’t any mapping.
The next piece I’m working on, just for fun, uses Google gears to go ahead and show the map. I’m still working on that step.
You can see my progress here.
Once I’m done I’ll provide my prototyping code. Should have what I’m after by the end of the weekend.