Scott Mebberson

Icon

Web Technologist

Custom Google Maps Icons

The ability to use custom Google Maps icons (the graphics that mark locations on a Google Map) has been around for a long time, but a feature that is rarely used.

You can use a custom icon to great affect, making your map ‘look and feel’ more like your brand. I’ve thrown together a quick example showing a custom icon on a Google Map.

After you’ve created your custom icon, it is relatively simply to define the custom icon:

// create the custom icon
var customIcon = new GIcon(G_DEFAULT_ICON);
customIcon.image = "wsimages/marker.png";
customIcon.iconSize = new GSize(109, 28);
customIcon.iconAnchor = new GPoint(30, 27);

and then use the custom icon:

var marker = new GMarker(point, {icon:customIcon});
map.addOverlay(marker);

Go and check it out, or download the example directly.

Filed under: google maps, technology, web 2.0

That one darn strip of cloud!

We currently have an interesting problem with Google Earth. There is a nice big cloud directly over a location we want to zoom in on.

The strip of cloud appears directly on top of the location we’re interested in, and it is proving rather annoying!

Google hasn’t updated this part of the world (or specifically this strip) for quite some time, so I thought I’d dig around to see what I could find out about the frequency of updates to the satellite imagery.

I found some interesting information, but in short, I didn’t find any real public information about how and when Google update the imagery, or what the selection criteria is (blurry vs obstructed, etc). It all seems rather random.

I should probably use the database report page, maybe Google might pay attention to this one silly strip of cloud? I can’t even imagine how many reports they receive to fix insignificant strips of the earth.

Filed under: google maps, technology, web 2.0

Google Maps ColdFusion Tag; now with official Google Maps API Driving Directions support

As the rather long title says, I’ve just updated my Google Maps ColdFusion Tag with support for the new official Google Maps API Driving Directions. In a previous post, I launched Driving Directions for my Google Maps ColdFusion Tag, however it didn’t use anything official from Google to achieve this. Adding support for the official API from Google will allow me to make it more feature rich and much more robust and stable.

There are a couple of other nice enhancements, including some JavaScript methods so you can update the directions on the maps, without having to reload the page. I’ve also added some more driving directions examples.

You can download the source (or a zipped 0.4 version) and check it out via subversion over at RIAForge.

Filed under: coldfusion, google maps, web 2.0

About Me

I'm a web technologist living and working in Adelaide, Australia.

My Tweets

Navigation

My Older Posts