Google Maps Hacks

Chapter 7. Extreme Google Maps Hacks

Hacks 62–70: Introduction

So far, we’ve seen the power and ease with which Google Maps can show nearly anything on a map, from your vacation photos to a hypothetical nuclear explosion. Now it’s time for us to take Google Maps hacks to the next level by adding whole new feature sets and APIs. In this chapter, we’ll supplement the missing features of Google Maps in various ways, by turning street addresses into map coordinates, generating dynamic icons using Google’s polyline service, adding new controls to bring in background imagery from around the ‘Net, and even creating our own custom background tiles! These hacks go far above and beyond anything that even Google could have imagined or intended for Google Maps—that’s why we call them “Extreme Google Maps Hacks.”

Find the Latitude and Longitude of a Street Address

The Google Maps API won’t do it for you, but there are other ways to find the coordinates of a given street address.

As we’ve seen all through this book, Google Maps makes it easy to make custom maps of anything for which you have a latitude and a longitude. However, people don’t tend to think of places in terms of geographic coordinates; more often, people commonly know and refer to places by a street or mailing address. In order to find and show these places on a map, we need to be able to turn a given address into the corresponding latitude/longitude coordinates. The process of turning addresses into map coordinates is generally referred ...