Fast map re-location using Google Static Maps v2 + geocoder
GeoMeme is a pet project of mine. It’s a web app, and also a mobile web app for iPhone and Android, that measures real-time local twitter trends.
Visitors to GeoMeme choose a location on the map, and two search terms to compare. GeoMeme then measures and compares the number of matching tweets within the bounds of the map, based on public data from a number of mobile twitter apps.
As an example, GeoMeme can work out that ‘District 9′ beats ‘Inglorious Basterds’ in Manhattan.
As well as offering users the normal pan and zoom controls to move the map around, GeoMeme also introduces an innovative geo-autocomplete control which is powered by the geocoder service from Google Maps v3 API and the new Static Maps v2 API.
This blog post shares some details of how the geo-autocomplete control works, and offers some code so you can build your own geo-autocomplete controls.
1. Based on a partial location typed by the user, obtain a list of possible matching locations:
If the user has already typed ‘San’ into a form field, we can obtain a list of possible matching locations by passing this partial location to the geocoder service from Google Maps v3 API, as follows:
