Flash GPS tracking via iPhone
Just recently I had some time and decided to take a look at the flash api for google maps. Initially I didn’t have a plan, I just wanted to start using the api, but once I realised how easy it was to get setup I thought I should try and do something a little bit more interesting, so I decided to see if I could track and tag myself across London.
The first nurdle to over come was how to track myself, I knew the a lot of mobile phones now use GPS for tracking and mapping and so started to look into weather I would be table to tap into this functionality in the same way google maps already does on the iPhone. After some quick googling I found an iPhone GPS tracking app (Insta Mapper) which would take my GPS coordinates at user defined intervals and publish them out to the Insta Mapper website where they can be recalled through the Insta Mapper api. Once this was done all I needed to do was to pull the feed into my flash app and feed the cooordinates into my google maps object, and voilà I have a little icon sitting on top of my map marking where I am.
So I can track myself across london, now to tag my most visited places to give these coordinates some meaning, so currently I am recording my coordinates at places of interest and adding them into an xml file along with a description. Then by doing some comparisons between coordinates and setting some distance thresholds I can tell whether I am in a place of interest and if so display it’s description hurrah. This tagging system isn’t the most elegant solution, it would be much better to have some sort of interface where I can review my locations on a map and then tag them, I could possibly use WordPress to ahieve this but as time is at a premium at the moment I went for the quick, easy, and dirty option.
One major problem with this solution is that you have to run the Insta Mapper App continuously it does not run in the background which basically makes tracking yourself at all times impossible. However some clever people have created tools to jailbreak your iPhone so you can install lots of lovely no apple approved apps, such as Backgrounder an iPhone app which allows you to control which apps are currently running on your iPhone, when they run, and whether to run them in the background. Using this little gem of an app I am able to run Insta Mapper continuously in the background and so am now able to track myself at all times without tieing up my phone.
I do have some more devlopement I’d like to do on this project, like checking my speed of movement so I can tell whether I’m walking or on a train, plain or automobile. I’d Also like to be able to predict if in transit what the final destination might be, possibly based upon my favourite locations and some directional trending, but these things will have to wait for another day.
You can track me here