Tatham Oddie

At both the REMIX10 conference in Melbourne, Australia and more recently TechEd New Zealand I presented on geolocation for developers.

This was the abstract:

It’s pretty obvious by now that geolocation is a heavy player in the next wave of applications and APIs. Now is the time to learn how to take advantage of this information and add context to your own applications. In this session we’ll look at geolocation at every layer of the stack – from open protocols to operating system APIs, from the browser to Windows Phone 7. Building a compelling geo-enabled experience takes more than simple coordinates. In this session Tatham will introduce the basics of determining a user’s location and then delve into some of the opportunities and restrictions that are specific to mobile devices and their interfaces.

The talk was filmed at TechEd New Zealand, and is available for download here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NewZealand/WEB205

(Note: this version has a Windows Phone 7 demo in it too.)

The first version of the talk was also filmed at REMIX10, and is available for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix/videos/default.aspx

Here are some links to the code and resources (but you really want to watch the talk first):

• My demo code
  http://gist.github.com/423252
• The W3C Geolocation API spec
  http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html
• The Flickr findByLatLon WOEID API
  http://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/?method=flickr.places.findByLatLon
• The core WOEID API
  http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/
• My recent locations
  http://tath.am/where
• The code that generates my personal location map
  http://github.com/tathamoddie/longitude/blob/master/longitude.rb

(Post last updated 7th Sep 2010 with new links and videos)