Wednesday, June 4, 2014

google maps is pretty easy!

I'm doing the website for Jamaica Plain's Porchfest (an afternoon with a bunch of bands on various porches across the city) I decided to go with Google Maps... I found their Javascript API reasonably well-documented with examples, and achieving a pretty good balance of simplicity and power.

You can see the rough Proof-of-Concept site and get a feel for what I through together, before it gets more complex. Google doesn't want to do a lookup-by-address for every point of interest, I think, so you should use a site like this convertor to lookup the Latitude/Longitude of your locations. The rest was straightforward, with some jQuery special sauce to tie in the markers on the map with the table. Making little information displays for each marker was straightforward as well (forgive my moderately crappy code there).

The default examples tend to be the "map is the full screen", and come to think of it, that might be a better bet for a website you expect to be viewed on mobile, the scrolling/zooming of window vs scrolling/zooming of map gets a little weird, so I think I might use the fullscreen approach for the final product.

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