google maps api
A sad day for London
Today has been a very sad day for London, the antithesis of the celebrations which were due yesterday for winning the 2012 Olympic bid. This morning unfolded as one of the worst days in London's recent history as terrorists attacked first the London Underground and then a bus near Russell Square.
I managed to avoid the attacks - although apparently by quite a close margin - though I know many others were not so lucky. My heart goes out to those who had this cowardly act inflicted upon them for no reason, their familes, their friends, their loved ones.
My department had today arranged a trip for the people on our course to pay a visit to the Ordnance Survey in Southampton. We had left London by about 9.20, unaware of any of the events which had happened on the Underground in the preceeding half an hour. Garbled reports of power surges and then terrorist attacks started to filter through to the radio on the coach but it wasn't until later that we realised the extent of what had happened so close to the place we had left from.
The whole day has left me a little shaken. To show you some of the reasons why, I have created a map (partly to learn more about programming using the Google Maps API) that plots the events of this morning. You can scroll around and click on markers to find out more.
It is frightening how close these events were to affecting me and the people I was with this morning, my friends and so many other innocent people in London. The London I came back to this afternoon is a different London, a London I never wanted to experience.
Learning about AJAX
In order to improve the interactivity of my photo map, I have been learning about different ways of linking the information that comes from my database of photos and the mapping data which comes from the Google Maps API to what the user is doing.
Using a mixture of technologies that are commonly known as AJAX (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), I have allowed the list of nearby locations - which shows to the right of the map - to update itself whenever the user moves the map around the screen. It will show a list of 5 places closest to the centre of the map and also the distance they are from the centre.
One next stage of development will be to allow the user to click on one of these name and automatically zoom the map to the right area, along with other features including improving what is actually shown on the map for each place.
Some of these new mapping features will probably require broadband to be able to enjoy them properly because they can be quite data intensive.
