Archived GIS Snippets
Published in 2013
Permanent URL
generate a google map
by fred van lieshout
This article shows how to create a map image in your browser, showing a number of location markers that are taken from a list of addresses, using a few HTML lines and client side JavaScript. It also demonstrates a simple trick to add labels to the marker pins on that map. The locations are specified as human readable addresses, which are then converted to GPS coordinates using Google's Geocoder. As a bonus, a progress bar shows while doing the location lookups. continued…
first published week of: 11/18/2013
Permanent URL
Geo Challenge iPhone app review
by randy williamson
Teaching – some parents may love this and some may bang their head in the walls! It is a tough task for many parents to teach geographical information to their kids. Many of them will love this task if they get a chance to teach their kids in a fun way, especially in the form of games!
Review
Geo Challenge is a free app for your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that gives your kids a fun way of learning about geographical details. It is very important for your juniors to learn about the flags and maps of many countries. Even many grown-ups are still confused in picking the correct country names by seeing their flags. Of course, it is a hard task for young ones to remember these details with usual study method they follow.
Geo Challenge is an interactive app for kids to spark their memory capacity. It has the collection of games that provide young ones an easy way to understand about the geographical data. You have to create a passport to begin the worldwide travel. The free version is limited to only one passport where the app has a paid version that offers more features as well.
YouTube Video
The app supports English and Japanese languages as users can choose their language at the beginning or change later from the help section. Free version has Spinning Globe, Map Puzzle, Map Quiz, Flag Flashcards and Flag Quiz for only Oceania region. Spinning Globe is a simple game where kids can see the globe on the screen with flags spotted on the respective countries. Players can simply tap on any of these flags and the app shows its country name, flag, their cultural costumes, currency, language and more!
Map Puzzle matches the country to a place on the map where Map & Flag quizzes test your kid’s memory power. Finally, a flashcard game allows kids to memorize the countries by their flags. The games are perfectly shaped up for young children so that they can easily memorize geographical details. On spinning the coin, the app has some serious crashing issues in the Map Puzzle and Map Quiz sections! Another flaw was the loading time between the screens, which was really slow! I hope developers will take a look at the above points to make it a great educational tool.
Recommendation continued…
first published week of: 03/04/2013
Permanent URL
Geo Tracker: GPS Tracking App for iOS Released
ObjectGraph released its Geo Tracker app for iOS! Geo Tracker tracks your paths and speed while walking, hiking, biking, or commuting. This app works with iPhone and iPad and is designed for non-retina, retina and also iPhone 5 layouts. It is available through Apple's App Store.
Customize Geo Tracker for your own personal journeys simply by changing the app settings. You can control:
- Precision of the GPS coordinates (from within 30m to less than 7m accurate)
- How often the points have to be recorded (every 5m to every 30m)
- Units of measure (in miles, km, etc.)
- Map display type (standard, satellite, or hybrid)
first published week of: 10/14/2013
Permanent URL
Geo-Located Tweets Reveal International Patterns of Human Travel
One of the fascinating side-effects of the Twitter phenomenon is that it provides an entirely new lens through which to study humanity. In particular, a growing number of tweets contain information about the tweeter’s location. So various groups have studied the spatial distribution of tweets and how they vary from one location to another.
Today, Bartosz Hawelka at the University of Salzburg in Austria and a few pals take this idea a step further. These guys have analysed the geolocation data associated with a dataset of tweets from all over the world to study the hidden patterns of international travel that this might reveal.
They say geolocated Twitter messages reveal global patterns of human mobility in a ways never before studied. And the data shows how travel patterns vary across cultures, countries and throughout the year as well.
Their approach is relatively straightforward. They begin with a dataset of almost a billion geolocated tweets sent between 1 January and 31 December 2012. From this, Hawelka and co removed all nonhuman Twitter activity such as advertising and certain types of gaming. They also excluded any Twitter account in which the data implied the user was relocating at speeds faster than a passenger plane.
They then determined the home location of each user. They did this by analysing the locations that each user tweeted from and then defined the country of residence is the place with the most activity.
That produced a database of Twitter ‘residents’ in 243 of the world’s 253 territories. The most populous Twitter nation is the US with over 3.8 million users, followed by the UK, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan and Spain which all have more than 500,000 users. continued…
first published week of: 11/18/2013
Permanent URL
Geo-Location, Geo-Fencing & Creep Factor: The Future of Location Data and Mobile Advertising
by benjamin spiegel
Mobile is all around us, digital technologies changing faster than any mere mortal can track, and marketers are now pushing out ads to mobile users in highly effective ways.
The rise of smartphone usage, GPS-enabled devices and location-based services, smarter apps, and man's seeming desire to share every move publicly has resulted in a massive amount of geographic- and behavior-based data. Of course, it can be leveraged using the latest technology.
Technologic advances have allowed interactive mobile engagement through ad retargeting and location based push solutions. Marketers that use these strategies to create meaningful connections between brands and consumers will win the day. However, although marketers are ready to utilize these advancements, privacy concerns and a lack of understanding among consumers about how retargeting works hold us back. continued…
first published week of: 10/14/2013
Permanent URL
Geocoding a SharePoint List Item
Bing Maps is often integrated into SharePoint sites to display different types of information, from the location of customers to advance business intelligence information. A common task that needs to be carried out at some point is geocoding the location data so it can be displayed on a map. I’ve seen many different implementations, some good and others not so much. Whenever possible you should try and geocode the data ahead of time and store the coordinates. This will improve performance and generate a lot less transactions against your Bing Maps account.
In this blog post we are going to create a SharePoint List and add the functionality to geocode an item while also updating the coordinates when editing. This will allow us to store the coordinate information right in the SharePoint List. continued…
first published week of: 03/11/2013