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 ;-)
Recently - as I bought a Google Nexus S some time ago - I started taking a look into development of applications for the Android platform. After some experiments with the general hardware features like the accelerometer and others, I have implemented a class that may be useful for others, too.
One thing I like on the Nexus is the "Car Home" app made by Google. While driving, it provides you a very simple interface with large buttons in order to trigger different actions. Although you can create shortcuts with it, I thought it might be even better if you could have this launcher menu in the app itself that your are developing.
In combination to my SimpleMarker class I have made an engine for clustering those markers if many of them are in a similar location. However, before you use this engine in your application, please note the following: there are probably much better classes for managing high counts of markers, e.g. the MarkerManager class from the Google Maps Utility Library. My SimpleMarker class is also compatible to this MarkerManager, if you want to combine lightweight markers with managing classes.
You still might want to take a look on my code if you want to learn how clustering can be done, as I tried to design the code as understandable as possible. This is why I wrote this article, so keep on reading and see how it works ;-).
