Beginning Google Maps Applications

Where is the Google Maps API going in the new year? No one but the development team is certain, but I’m willing to take a gamble and look once more into my cloudy crystal ball.
Continue reading ‘The Google Maps API: Predictions for 2007′

Hello Everyone.

We’ve had a request to add forums to this site for all of our readers to help each other and share ideas. Jeff, Mike and I considered this a few months ago and decided that we probably didn’t have enough traffic to warrant it. But with over 100 subscribers to our feed and an average of 200 visitors a day, maybe things have changed.

If you’d like to see a forum installed on this site, please voice your opinion in the comments. If it’s a common request we’ll do our best to add one early in the new year.

Happy Holidays.

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately so I wanted to point out some articles that Jeff has written in the last few weeks. They don’t directly relate to Google Maps development but they are excellent articles about web development in general. I hope you find them useful.

• Doing it Asynchronously: Demonstration and explanation of the A in Ajax.
• The Tabular Data Enigma: An excellent discussion of tables versus CSS.
• Relativity and your Website: Explanation of relative paths versus document roots.
• Play Nice With Others: Javascript Namespace considerations.
• Yet another Javascript Logger: GLog-like logger for non-GMaps applications.

I’ve also been doing some research into Search Engine Optimization and traffic generation. If you’re interested in that you can find my article here: How to Meet New Friends: Traffic Generation Basics.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: A savvy reader Carl Olsen pointed out that it wasn’t actually necessary to check for the infoWindow state and the problem could simply be fixed by a check for an overlay. The post has been updated accordingly. Thanks Carl.

It seems that somewhere along the line something changed with the event handling and the Chapter 3 code wasn’t quite working right.
The problem listing is 3-4 where we defined the click event for the map. When you clicked inside the info window and associated form elements, or on a new marker, the click event for the map fired as well as the click event for the info window and overlays. According to the Google Maps API this is the desired effect, so the listing has been updated to include an if statement that ensures the click wasn’t on an overlay, and the info window isn’t already open:

if(!overlay) {

// run the code

}

This seems to have cleared up most of the issues with the only caveat being that you’ll have to manually close the infoWindow first to position it in a new location.

Thanks to those who pointed out the bug.

It’s been an active few weeks for the Google Maps API team. They’ve announced a number of interesting new additions, and the community has discovered a few more. We can’t possibly hope to cover everything in great detail, but we do hope to work these changes into any future revisions of our book. Until then, here is a summary of what we’ve learned in the last little while. Continue reading ‘New Aspects of the Google Maps API’