Alcides Fonseca

I’ve been reading tons of reactions to the launch of the latest best-game-ever GTA IV. I liked Penny Arcade’s the most. And real geeks are also impressed by GoogleMaps-powered Liberty City Map. It is a nice mashup indeed.

Today Luís remembered me of Google Drive where you could drive a little yellow car around the world in real streets. Then it hit me: What about joining the two of then, add some extra features, and get a javascript web-based GTA game, with the top-view, just like the original one (which I’m a fan of!).

Someone with a lot of free time? Anyone? Maybe you?

Context-driven advertising is becoming widely popular, proved by the Adsense’s success. Two days ago, while talking to Tiago Serra about how to get money from google maps mashups, I thought about a advertising system, just like Adsense, but georeferenced. Publishers would charge their GeoAds account with credits and then add their ads to the system with their coordinates. Mashup owners would add a little code to their website (compatible with GoogleMaps, LiveEarth and YahooMaps) and from then on, all the ads would be seen in their application. And for each user click, the credit changes from the advertiser to the publisher (can be traded later for real world money).

But this system will only work fine if adopted by a large number of online geo-based services in order to show advertisers this is really a good way of publicize businesses just like local outdoors. So if you own a GeoMashup, feel free to contact me and share some ideas about GeoAdvertising.

As I’ve already posted here, I’ve been working the last two months on the ejaki project. I was assigned to make its web interface and I have it working already.

The previous website was very ugly and the ejaki data displaying was only a list of ejakis with a small google maps thumbnail for each one. It was running in ASP.NET (SQL server as database) and was using .NET authentication methods.

It was my first time working with ASP.net (I’ve only worked with classic ASP a few years ago) and I didn’t like quite much the webcontrols and the way things were organized. A RAD MVC platform for ASP.NET is what I really wanted, but Midgard wasn’t ready yet.

I decided to remake the website all from scratch. The database was changed not to use that heavy .NET authentication modules and to add some extra information. As for javascript, I chose Prototype + Script.aculo.us + MyPrototype and it was the first time I’ve seen it being used with ASP.NET. It works the same way as in ruby, python or PHP, you just have to make a ashx file (Generic Handler) with the response you want to load with AJAX methods. I found the MASTER and partial page system pretty weak for some stuff I wanted to do.

In the new website I tried a different approach. Being the data mainly geographical, the map is now the center of the website, and everything works around it. This may raise issues with browsers not compatible with Google Maps API and Mobile Devices (a target platform). So in the future, a mobile website will probably be done.

As for now, I’ve revamping the Windows Mobile software so it looks more cool to use. If you’re attending Barcamp Portugal, I’ll be making a short presentation with a demo, so if you do have a PDA with GPS, please don’t forget it ;)

Before putting my hands in the ejaki project, the previous version of the website was pretty old-fashion but used Google Maps API. Wow I though, but then I saw it was only used to get thumbnails for each ejaki (Point of Interest). Well, in my opinion, the map should be the center of the website, just like it is on the mobile app, since Geography is the background of our shared information.

First I had to evaluate the existing APIs: Google Maps was indeed good, proved by the fact it is the most used, and includes features like GeoCoder, remote GML overlays, traffic and driving directions. This should be useful features to add in the future for our application.

Yahoo Maps AJAX (Flash was not an option) was pretty good, with almost all the features as Google’s but with integration with Y! Pipes and GeoRSS. This extras were not relevant since we intend to use only our database (in which other information can be added).

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth shown to be a really nice platform. Microsoft is known by being left behind in the web2.0 age, but this one is from far the most powerful engine. Since 3d visualization, “Birds eye”, powerful information finder, and all the features from both Yahoo’s and Google’s APIs. But there as a downside that matters. Since this is a scientific research project, we don’t like to use proprietary formats, and Microsoft is known for that. We wouldn’t like the possibility of in the future their API would only work on IE.

Open Layers is a free and opensource library, a project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As an opensource alternative it would be nice to use and foment it, but it’s too poor for now. No Satellite view, no geocoding and nothing that would make it more useful for our users. Maybe in the future in another project…

As so, we sticked to Google Maps since it had the basics and some extras that might be useful in the future. Later working with it, I found out it was really nice, but one function was missing: To set the zoom depending on the geocoding answer, and so here you have it for free ;)