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I bought the domain, so it is coming together. Before I release I want to have RSS, Mulit-Track and a good design (I think I will be on my own for this one…).
The placeholder that is up right now doesn’t have much to do with the final design, I just needed to put something up quick.
My app is taking a life of its own. I am working on picking the perfect domain for this, and when I do you can see it in action.
Here’s what it is: A mashup of Google Maps and USPS (UPS and FEDEX are the first slated improvements). It is 100% AJAXified and really quite cool. It does a number of different calculations for users, from the distance between two stops on a package’s route to the average speed between each point.
I am being held back by a problem that I am making no progress with though. In FireFox it works perfect. But IE and Safari behave the same but different from Firefox. They decide to plot the stops in a random order, which is different each time. I have yet to discover any pattern. Firefox though plots in the correct and same order each time. Has anybody heard of anything like this before?
here are some existing projects:
As I promised I am working on my latest web app for release hopefully before the holidays. Not going into it too much it is a mashup of USPS and Google Maps.
This has been my first true mashup and it is like learning a whole new language, or several. For this I have had to learn the USPS API, Google Maps API and how to setup and use a proxy. This required the PEAR HTTP_Request to be installed on my server, actually easier than I thought. If you have cpanel you can just go to the php config and hit the button there and poof.
All this is good, I love learning these new things but I am also disappointed in the flexibility of some of them. After sometime without it Google released their geocoder object into the API. Now developers can pass it an address and get a longitude and latitude back – something you can actually plot on a map.
Before Google released this developers had to rely on geocoder.us for the longitude and latitude. In my experience this service is slower and less reliable. So using Google’s geocoder is great. BUT, it is somewhat inflexible and I haven’t yet fount a workaround for my problem. Without going into it too much now while it is unsolved and offers little value to you, I am having trouble passing variables resulting in a lack of info in the info box that pops up when you click on a marker on a map.
I have decided to move past this on the project and keep up my momentum because the info box is not a mission critical feature, but it is still pretty key, so I will get it figured before I tell you what this is all really about.
This project also gets me thinking, of course, about copyright and intellectual property. I promised to make this code OpenSource, well I need to figure out how to do this and remain my status in the project. That is for Another post.
Some Google Maps API Resources that have helped me:
So months ago I posted that version 1.0 of this site was out and ready to go. Well that was nothing more than a flat lie. I haven’t done anything on the site but kick myself for not working on it for the last nearly 5 months.
After really getting into school this term and taking classes where the Instructors really push ‘the real world’ I found the motivation to do my own work. The last five months I have been swamped working on projects like OSI Rock Stars, Defiant Gardens, Oasis Connect and DARTS Connect. Some of these projects have been more enjoyable than others and some are still going but overall having a full time freelance job on top of going to school full time ‘aint easy. It better pay off!
Poke around the site, new things are going to be going up all the time. I have an arsenal of apps that I have been developing - AJAX and PHP, Wordpress plugins, some Google API stuff and a bit of Facebook of course. I think they are all pretty cool but you can let me know as I start releasing them. They will all be OpenSource and each hosted on their own, so hopefully you will find them useful.
Check back - or don’t, I’ll be here either way.