Menace

Tuesday, 20th April 2010 / No Comments »

Where am I?

While relaxing in Hyde Park on a lovely Sunday afternoon a friend called and said he was going meet me there. Cue a silly number of phone calls to each other say things like “I’m by the gazebo”, “No you’re not I can’t see you there”, “It’s the white one right?”, “No, it’s the brown one-wait what are you wearing? No, sorry that’s not you”.

It occurred to me, waiting there, wondering if he was heading in the opposite direction towards the gazebo with the white roof and brown poles, rather than the one I was near with the brown roof and white poles, that it would be much easier if I could just send him my GPS coordinates directly, rather than this carrying about. So, a simple web page later and now I can SMS my current location with a handy google map link to anyone.

Simple Geolocation you say?

Pretty much. Lumped in with all the other cool things that people are calling “HTML5″ is the GeoLocation API. It allows your browser to attempt to determine your location, with your permission of course, all through Javascript and like any API you can do something cool and useful with it, but never for evil. NEVER!

Right now it’s supported by the iPhone, Firefox (from 3.5) and Chrome 5 (might still only be in the dev channels, not 100% sure on that). My version of Safari (4.0.5) seems flaky with the calls at times, Opera 10.5 also supports the API, but I’ve not tested it, nor bothered looking at IE, which I assume fails. I understand that the current versions of Android (can) use GoogleGears to get geolocation data, but again I’ve not looked closely into it.

Downsides?

While it’s primarily an stupidly simple “iPhone Web app”, it doesn’t quite do everything I want. For example, I really wanted it to create the entire SMS message for me. The iPhone’s API allows you to launch the SMS application, but it won’t allow you to craft a full message for sending, thus the reason you need to copy the link.

The accuracy is also fair from perfect, on Firefox connected to the net by a 3G dongle I’m 166000 metres from where I actually am (Mister Sam Farrow was similarly also 122000 metres from his location). On my iPhone I’m anywhere from 5 to 1000 metres. So I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re contacting search and rescue as a way of letting them know where you are.