iPhone OS 3.0 - Safari Geolocation

Having installed iPhone OS 3.0 today, the first thing I wanted to play with (after MMS and Copy/Paste) was the Safari Geographical Location support.

The best example code I found was this iPhone 3.0 geolocation javascript API example... however for some reason the Google 'static map' images wouldn't work for me. I'm not 100% sure why (since the blog post appears to show it working) - but Safari on the iPhone does handle http://maps.google.com URLs in a special way (at least it does if they're anchor/links, in which case it triggers the Maps application).

Anyway, since I was keen to get "something" working, I Googled a basic 'image passthrough proxy' - which seemed to fix the problem.


The HTML and javascript is very simple (it's repeated from here).

function handler(location) {
    var message = document.getElementById("message");
    var loc = location.coords.latitude + "," + location.coords.longitude;
    message.innerHTML = "<img src='MapImageHandler.aspx?centerPoint="+ loc +"' />";
    message.innerHTML+="<p>Longitude: " + location.coords.longitude + "<br />";
    message.innerHTML+="Latitude: " + location.coords.latitude + "<br />";
    message.innerHTML += "Accuracy: " + location.coords.accuracy + "</p>";
}
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(handler);

The MapImageHandler.aspx code is also very short (and was sourced from here).

That's about the most basic geolocation sample you could... now to find something useful to do with it! Thanks to the two authors of the code I stitched together (blog.bemoko.com and guy off CodeProject).

Customizing Bing (on your site)

It's fairly easy to create a site-specific, bing-powered search box, using the basic wizard at www.bing.com/siteowner.

However, it turned out to be less obvious how to 'customize' it's behaviour... specifically I wanted the search to search 'sites in Australia' by default. The final result is shown below, and you can try it here



Working with Advanced Queries in the Windows Live Search Box provides some hints about how you can customize the javascript var WLSearchBoxConfiguration={...} which controls how the search box works.

By default it looks like this

var WLSearchBoxConfiguration=
{
"global":{
 "serverDNS":"www.bing.com",
 "market":"en-AU"
},
"appearance":{
 "autoHideTopControl":false,
 "width":600,
 "height":400,
 "theme":"Blue"
},
"scopes":[
 {
  "type":"web",
  "caption":"Web",
  "searchParam":""
 }
]
}

which provides a simple web search. To force the search to be "only for sites from Australia" we needed to add a new scope with a searchParam set:

"searchParam":"loc:AU"

Restricting to a specific site/domain is more obvious:

"searchParam": "site:conceptdev.blogspot.com"

It ends up looking like this:

var WLSearchBoxConfiguration=
{
    "global":{
        "serverDNS":"www.bing.com",
        "market":"en-AU"
    },
    "appearance":{
        "autoHideTopControl":false,
        "width":600,
        "height":400,
        "theme":"Blue"
    },
    "scopes": [
        {
            "type": "web",
            "caption": "this site",
            "searchParam": "site:conceptdevelopment.net"
        }
        ,
        {
            "type": "web",
            "caption": "ConceptDev Blog",
            "searchParam": "site:conceptdev.blogspot.com"
        }
        ,
        {
            "type":"web",
            "caption":"Web (Australia)",
            "searchParam":"loc:AU"
        }
        ,
        {
            "type":"web",
            "caption":"Web (all)",
            "searchParam":""
        }
    ]
}

It doesn't look like you need to worry too much about the ASCII-Hex encoding for simple characters (although if you want to encode them, there are plenty of tools).

How I read a resumé...

I came across this graphic today - linked from a great post on How to apply for a professional job - and had to post a link to it. Many of the points are funny/humorous - generally because they're (kinda) true! All the ones about attention-to-detail in your CV are 100% spot-on.