This site is a bit more hardware orientated but you may find some of it useful:
Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
11–20 of 20 posts
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#12Check this out: http://del.icio.us/popular/gis and http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#13The GPS chip/unit embeded in cell phones is incredibly minimal (at least when I reviewed the topic a couple years ago). The phone itself does not calculate lat/lon. The phone captures the bare timebase GPS signal, uplinks the raw sat numbers to a server which calculates the actual coords and transmits that back to the phone. But privacy issues are probably the biggest reason lat/lon is not more available for app usag…
That's nonsense. I know of no phone or device that does this, it's not like the calculations needed are exactly challenging even for your typical phone with a 200Mhz arm chip.
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#14I've looked into it a little bit and FireEagle(http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/) seem's ok, but it works with Navizon (http://www.navizon.com/) which I think would be a better solution if it provided api access to the free users of it's product.
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#15Here are my delicious location links: http://del.icio.us/jmatt.peterson/location There are a lot of APIs if you are going from address, city, zip. All sorts of variations - free, commercial, metadata, super accurate, international, US only, shipping, etc. There are fewer and they are less reliable if you have a latitude / longitude and want address, major intersection, city, etc. Initially I'd code for phones that pr…
Thanks this is fantastic. Going from address is fairly straightforward as you say. However, I am looking to use the GPS or tower triangulation built into newer phones. I'm assuming this is available through the ipHone and android APAs? Is any of your code open-source by any chance? Just looking for some tips as to how to get started - even the basics.
There's plenty of code on the Nokia wiki, including a complete compass application: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/GPS_Compass
(See also, the location category index http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Symbian_C%2B%2B_Locati... )
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#16Having spent many years working on this problem in the US market, here's my two cents ... There are tens of millions of mainstream handsets on the market that contain GPS, including virtually all phones sold by Sprint and Verizon in the past few years and most new AT&T phones going forward. However, location is typically locked down and requires a relationship with the carrier to access the handset location APIs. For…
I also work at a startup in the location space. If you're just looking to play around and have fun, I'd definitely recommend avoiding the "feature phones" (J2ME and BREW) and focusing instead in Symbian and Blackberry.
Most Windows Mobile devices in the US don't allow access to GPS or have it deliberatly crippled (The Sprint Mogul and AT&T Tilt are the only two I know of with user accessible GPS).
iPhone is still an unknown, as I doubt Apple will open up its app store to every developer and every app. Right now it's probably best to wait and see.
Android is, well, not out yet. Wait for a device to make it to market.
WHERE is also a fast easy way to get one shot fixes and rapidly deploy an application to the millions of "feature phones" out there already, but it won't give you background updates or complete control over the user experience.
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#17I can give you a teeny tiny head start. Here is the logic for determining the distance (in miles) between two points. sqrt((power(69.1 * (latitude1 - latitude2),2) + power(69.1 * (longitude1 - longitude2) * cos(latitude1 / 57.3), 2))) This is coming from SQL server... it took a little fidgeting to get the actual distances right because of the weird curvature of the earth issue; but it should get you close for reasona…
> it took a little fidgeting to get the actual distances right because of the weird curvature of the earth issue; but it should get you close for reasonable distances.
Probably can't tell you how we solve it at work, but the very much publicly-available book Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications, Third Edition by de Berg, Cheong, et al., mentions something about the robustness of geometric algorithms using inexact (floating point) vs. exact arithmetic. :-)
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#18I can give you a teeny tiny head start. Here is the logic for determining the distance (in miles) between two points. sqrt((power(69.1 * (latitude1 - latitude2),2) + power(69.1 * (longitude1 - longitude2) * cos(latitude1 / 57.3), 2))) This is coming from SQL server... it took a little fidgeting to get the actual distances right because of the weird curvature of the earth issue; but it should get you close for reasona…
> it took a little fidgeting to get the actual distances right because of the weird curvature of the earth issue; but it should get you close for reasonable distances. Probably can't tell you how we solve it at work, but the very much publicly-available book Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications, Third Edition by de Berg, Cheong, et al., mentions something about the robustness of geometric algorithms us…
I can never tell the appropriate way to say thank you to a poster here. Should I upvote? Should I leave a comment? In this case, I'll do both.
Thanks for the recommendation, most of the maths work I do these days is financial, so geometry is a nice diversion. I hadn't seen this text before so I've got it bookmarked for some reading now.
As an aside, is this something I would have gotten some exposure to if I'd been a college grad? Any time I see things like this, I worry there are large swaths of text I've missed in self-study.
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it took a little fidgeting to get the actual distances right because of the weird curvature of the earth issue; but it should get you close for reasonable distances. Probably can't tell you how we solve it at work, but the very much publicly-available book Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications, Third Edition by de Berg, Cheong, et al., mentions something about the robustness of geometric algorithms us…
I can never tell the appropriate way to say thank you to a poster here. Should I upvote? Should I leave a comment? In this case, I'll do both. Thanks for the recommendation, most of the maths work I do these days is financial, so geometry is a nice diversion. I hadn't seen this text before so I've got it bookmarked for some reading now. As an aside, is this something I would have gotten some exposure to if I'd been a…
> As an aside, is this something I would have gotten some exposure to if I'd been a college grad?
You might have had some exposure to the subject, but probably as part of other problems, i.e. not under the name Computational Geometry. For me, the most valuable thing was learning that this was an actual field with a name, which gave me a starting point for self-study.
Also check out Computational Geometry in C, Second Ed., by O'Rourke. It goes into more low-level implementation details (the first book I mentioned is a good high-level introduction to reasoning about geometric algorithms, so you should read that first).
Re: Ask YC: Want to learn about GPS/Location Based Programming. Where to start?
#20DISCLAIMER: I work for the Yahoo Developer Network
Yahoo recently released an updated version of the Where On Earth (WOE) API for Where 2.0 (more info at http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/).
It's pretty cool, I especially like the way that WOE deals with hierarchy in places. So a street address is normally part of neighbourhood or area of a city, which is part of a state, etc.
One of my other favourite projects at Y! at the moment is also about LBS. Fireagle is one of the Brickhouse projects, so those guys are actually based in San Francisco. http://fireeagle.yahoo.net is still invite only, but that's mostly to hide it from consumers until it's ready to go. Fireeagle acts as middlewear, allowing users to update their location in lots of ways through an API (Text string, GPS units, Cell phone via services like Navizon, etc) and then share is with apps of their choice. This means that the user only has to update Fireeagle to update all their apps.
It also means app developers don't need to provide lots of ways to specify location. They can just use Fireeagle and forget about the rest.
I have some invites so if you have a good idea let me know and I'll hook you up.