My latest addition to the google-maps-api-addon
library is the PanoMarker, a marker which is able to remain at a
fixed position inside of a custom StreetView panorama. It can be used to
annotate points of interest (POI) inside a particular panorama regardless of the
user's viewing direction. The difficulty in creating a marker that remains at a
fixed position lies in the projection from a spherical panorama to a
two-dimensional viewport. POIs are adressed in terms of heading and pitch angles
with respect to the panorama's center. The viewport uses good old pixels for
positioning elements. In this article I will elaborate on how to find the pixel
coordinates on the viewport given heading and pitch angles of a POI.
One thing I was working on during my internship at Google was a beautiful new look for Checkins. The extension I now made* takes map images shown in such Checkins and replaces them by an actual map which you can zoom and drag around!
You may remember the SimpleMarker class I made about a year ago. Recently, I started working with the Maps API quite a lot again since I'm currently writing a Google+ extension with which you can get a map of your circles. During development, I realized that an update of my marker class was long overdue. Not anymore ;-)
Today Google has released a bunch of new features for the Google+ API. One feature that particulary striked my eye (just after I have released my new website including this blog) was the possibility to obtain the comments for a specific activity.
Despite the fact that it's currently only a one-way feature (i.e. you can get comments but not write new ones), why not using it as a commenting system for a blog? Sure, it's not very useful right now if the only possibility to add a new comment is to head over to the corresponding Google+ post. But as soon as writing is allowed, this could serve as a great way to outsource the commenting system to Google+, where one can probably reach a much higher range of persons compared to one's personal website.
Recently Google introduced a new API which enables developers to interact with their latest social networking service - Google+. Although the API is currently pretty limited, many nice apps have been written by developers all over the world. I myself gave it a try, too.