My Little World

It's been a week since I've had a chance to really spend a whole day to work on the apt project. I spent a lot of time learning how CloudMade's Geocoding engine works, and now when Albert types in "San Diego, California" the app actually pulls up a map of San Diego. CloudMade's engine also allows you to search for generic places like apartments by typing "apartments near Tempe, AZ" for example. It doesn't work very well, I only got Cholla Apartments doing such a search. Added a zoom bar to the map as well as a doubleclick event so you can zoom in anywhere by double clicking the mouse. Holding the left mouse button and moving allows the user to pan across the map. I wanted to add a custom sidebar today but CloudMade still hasn't documented that yet.

I also want to look through the Mapping 101 book I bought to learn about the Mapstraction API. Making the app using Mapstraction would save us in the future in case we have to switch mapping providers. Mapstraction is just a wrapper around all the various mapping API's out there. So if we have to switch from CloudMade to say, Google Maps, the amount of code needed to be rewritten would be minimal.

So now that I can quickly search for any location on the planet, it's time to work on that database again. I'm thinking of starting with data mining Craigslist first. That's what I'll be working on for the rest of the day.

So the latest working prototype for you guys to play with is located here: Apt Prototype