Mobile Media Midterm: Qoords (10/12/2010)

For the midterm, I went forward with my location-tracking application. One of my goals was to make the application usable on an iPhone in the Safari browser app. The below screen shots were taken off my iPhone, illustrating some of the app’s functionality.

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The app is iPhone friendly with large buttons and full-res imagery.

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Its easy to find your location and save it to the database.

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You can see all the saved locations and load them to the map.

The Concept

The Concept is to create an browser-based application for easily storing your location and accessing your stored entries. The finished app would have unique users, allowing an opportunity for people to search, share, and collaborate with one another’s data. In this initial execution, there is only a single default user, so all stored locations are put into the same place.

The Technical Details

This app utilizes PHP, Javascript, HTML, and SQL to function. I’ve made use of the Google Maps API for javascript for most of the front-end functionality, such as finding a location, inputting an existing location, and dragging around the location markers to adjust the positions.

Once a position is determined, it can get stored in the database using a simple form for creating a name. Then in the ‘list’ view these stored entries are listed and can be clicked on to load them on the map.

Much of the development of the app went into fine tuning this very functionality.

Next Steps

The next step is to make a user table in the database and allow users to login to the site. Once you are logged in as a unique user, you could have your own unique location data to add to and read back from. And once their are multiple users in the community, there would be the ability to connect to one another and choose whether your locations are shared publicly, among your connected peers, or not at all.

The whole concept for this app initially came from the desire to track a food truck, so I’d also like the ability to have users upload their own images to use as a marker on the map, instead of the default marker.

In general, there are numerous ways to expand upon this concept and build a great, usable app. I see this midterm assignment as a great kickoff point, and now need to plug 100 more hours into the coding to really push this application further.