Filed under: Internets
For every Microsoft announcement of a product/service that will be available some months/years down the road, Google seems to announce a product/service that is available immediately.
Today they announced an official API for Google Maps. This is finally a reason for me to get off my butt and learn the ins and outs of Javascript and XML.
After work today, Seth and I started playing around with the API. Recently Seth worked on a greasemonkey script to show MBTA subway and bus lines through google maps. This time around we decided to try overlaying the T lines on top of a regular map using the API’s built-in polyline functionality. The benefit is that you get to use the excellent street and satellite data from google, and no greasemonkey script is required. Seth started putting some code together while I figured out the latitude and logitude of the various T stops in Boston. So far I only have a few of the locations of the red line, but it quickly became clear that it would work.
Click here for a working example. You can click each T stop to get it’s name, and in the future, any other relevant information. I’ll keep gathering T stop locations so we can add other T lines. Adding bus lines might get a little crazy.
Now that the API is official, I expect to see some pretty amazing applications built on top of it. All the while Microsoft is working on getting RSS into IE/Longhorn which should be out any year now.
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