Small Successes, Bugs, and Maps

First the great news! The new server for userscripts has finally been installed. There are still many kinks to work out (such as getting an ip for the old server which is now the development server), but things should start looking better on userscripts.org with each day.

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Flock has been a great experience so far. Every day there are new challenges, so I doubt boredom will ever be an issue. So far I've primarily been fixing bugs, but I've found ways to keep motivated.

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I did find some time to work on integrating mapping into the browser. Luckily yahoo provides a geocoding service, so developing this was much nicer than my previous work with google maps. Flock development builds (and the feb release) have a mapping topbar which you can drag addresses onto.  It can parse text as well as links to mapping services (yahoo and google).  Dragging an address adds it to your address store and the map.  You can zoom around and do all the normal things you do with maps.  We have many plans for better integration, but right now it works great for my use case: finding a house!

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Visiting craigslist, you see a place you might be interested in.  You drag the yahoo link to the map topbar, and

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it shows up on your list and on the map, you can click the pin to see the address, page title, and a link back to the craigslist page you found the address on. 

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Unfortunately right now discovering that you can drag addresses and links to addresses to the mapping topbar is impossible.  Hopefully before the feb release we can improve that!


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Published

Wed, 25 Jan 2006

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