WordPress for iPhone Forums

Use GPS. Embed maps.

1. cstaymates
   Member
   Jul 2, 2009, 4:26 PM

   Hi all. There is no way I can be the first to recommend this, however, a search of the forums yeilded no results. I would really like to see the iPhone app utilize the GPS capability of the phone to be able to embed a (google?) map into a post.

   I imagine this feature would be cool/useful for people blogging about a trip, to give readers a sense of where the actual posts are being written from.

   Thoughts?

2. quamen
   Member
   Jul 7, 2009, 9:06 AM

   It's been thought about, and it just might happen. But all things take time.

3. cstaymates
   Member
   Aug 30, 2009, 11:36 AM

   I've recently been traveling through Europe and have been using Google's static maps API to embed maps of sites on my blog (http://cstaymates.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/dubrovnik-sites/ for example) with pretty good results. My (less than optimal) process is this:

   1) Use Google Earth to find the GPS coodinates of where I am at. Sadly I couldn't find a great app that does only this. 'Here I Am" is okay, but doesn't let you directly copy the GPS coordinates to the iPhone's clipboard. You have to compose a dummy email with using the "Email" feature in the app. It does however give you the GPS coordinates in decimal which is nice (and necessary for static maps API). I unfortunately don't have an international data plan though so I have to do most of this when I get to a wifi hotspot which makes using "Here I Am" alltogether pointless for this.

   2) Use the calculator app to convert the GPS coordinates in Google Earth from minutes/seconds to decimal. and copy these numbers (to about 5 decimal places) to the notepad app.

   3) Use notepad app to construct a static map API URL and test by copying to a safari browser. This is annoying because i have to copy/paste around the super long API key all the time.

   4) Finally embed the link as an <img> tag in the blog post.

   This process as you can imagine takes quite a while and is extremely error prone. But it does look really good. Anyone interested in brainstorming some integration of this type of use case and collaborating on some code?

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