We've been looking for a new way to display all of our past hikes in UrbanHike. I was initially thinking Flash, because I pictured the map zooming in a out to different parts of the city of Pittsburgh. Also, I thought it would be easy and much simpler than coding something up with Google Maps (I was worried that I would have to use some kind of server-side scripting, which I don't think our site supports).
Anyway, I was way off. I had way too much trouble with Flash. Conversely, Google Maps was really freakin' simple to use. You can program it using JavaScript (at least for all the simple stuff we're doing), the API is really well documented, and it only took me like 30 minutes to get things up and running. Here is the prototype. Furthermore, if we get ambitious, we can do neat things like including the entire route of the hike, or something like that. Wicked.
In other news, I finally finished my SIGBOVIK submission yesterday at the "PC Meeting." As it turns out, all of the authors were on the program committee, so it looks like my paper may get in... But more importantly, it was a good environment in which to bounce ideas off of other people, and it looks like the final product is better than I was thinking it would be. I'll post a link in a couple days.
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