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Last night I tried a little experiment on my jailbroken iPhone. Since I’d already started poking about playing with my own Winterboard themes and have been tracking my iPhone’s location for a while now, I thought I’d see what happened if I mixed the two. So, how about wallpaper that followed you? It turns out that combining the two is relatively straight forward. Google now provide a mechanism for getting what they call static maps which will allow you to get an image centered on a set of coordinates. You can also add your own markers if you want.

There are some limitations on the number and size of the maps that you can retrieve so I employed a very simple caching mechanism to ensure I didn’t annoy Google. This certainly helps speed things up when testing and also enabled me to identify a small issue I was having.

One of the things I wanted to happen was that the image on the phone would only change if the location of the phone had changed and the phone had a network connection of some type (wifi/edge etc). So far it works pretty well except when the phone uses SkyHook IP  which manages to be 100’s of kilometers out. Thankfully since my positioning database has the source of the positioning I can filter out those dodgy SkyHook IP results.

I also found that it was better to remove the text from the docked icons. Well, technically, I didn’t actually remove it I just made it transparent. The text for the other icons was made red so that it can be seen over the underlying map. It’s a simple process. By adding the following lines to the Info.plist of my Winterboard theme, I get the desired effect.

 
	<key>UndockedIconLabelStyle</key>
	<string>font-size: 13px; color: red</string>
 
	<key>DockedIconLabelStyle</key>
	<string>font-size: 13px; color: transparent</string>

Any of the Google maps styles can be used (roadmap, mobile, satellite etc) but I prefer the mobile one since it’s clearer and the number of bytes that need to be transmitted is less than half of that for the satellite image.

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Tagged with: api • google • image • iphone • opensource • software • tracking
September 22, 2008 11:50

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