semi/signal

New feature added to dotspott earlier this week: you can now create a public URL for any of your spotts, which will generate a page that looks something like the following,

… and is accessible to anyone on the web.

Currently this can only be done from the web client:

• Login
• Click “Share…” on the submenu for the spott you want to make a link for
• Click the “Make Public” button; the spott will be made public and the URL will appear

Note: All spotts are private by default; they can only be seen by you when you login or by someone with whom you’ve shared the spott info via email.

Edit: I should mention this is a proof of concept of Unity. There are actually no async calls beyond those for Google Maps.

Two very minor updates to the dotspott web client:

• Sticky note icons now appears when a note is attached to a spott. Clicking the icon will bring up a dialog with the note.
• Spott submenus are now made to look more like buttons and spaced a bit further down from the tag list.

The dotspott web client has been updated yet again, this time I’ve added support for photo markers.

Something pretty cool in MSSQL Server Management Studio: for columns with the geography data type, Management Studio will plot the points on a map. Here’s a map of all locations tagged from all dotspott users.

Local search is now available on the dotspott web client; allowing you to search for local venues and add them to your list of spotts.

The Google Maps API v3, which is used by dotspott, doesn’t really allow for local search and the Local Search API itself is deprecated (however, as per Google’s deprecation policy, it should be available until Nov. 2013). What I did was use gmaps-api-v3-googlebar, which allows adding a google-bar like control to the map.

One interesting thing I needed to do that wasn’t directly possible with gmaps-api-v3-googlebar update a few other things after one of the search results were selected. I wanted to avoid touching the gmaps-api-v3-googlebar code, so I did this by getting a reference to the existing event handler, then overwriting it with a new function, which called the previous event handler function.

Here’s an example where we grab the reference to the existing selectResult event handler (searchResultPre), overwrite with a new event handler, call the previous handler (binding to window.gbar, the instance of window.jeremy.jGoogleBar; binding is necessary b/c the event handler references this internally), then add some new functionality where we modify a paragraph element in the DOM (id = map_position) to show the position of the local marker that is selected.

oh, and yes, this is using jQuery; $(‘#map_position’) should have given it away.

dotspott for webOS v1.3.0 should now be available in the webOS app catalog.

Primarily, there’s a new look compared to the older hotspotdot app. Not a whole lot of new features, but two noteworthy additions:

• dotspott will show your current locations and, using the Google Map API, reverse geocode the latitude, longitude pair to tell you where you are.
• Support for attaching photos to spotts

A smaller update (v1.3.1) should out in the coming week with some minor stylistic additions.

I’ve been working on a fairly major update to hotspotdot, both the web client and the webOS mobile app.

First, a new name, accompanied by a new logo.
hotspotdot is now dotspott:

This should (hopefully) put an end to any confusion that the app has anything to do with wi-fi hotspots. It also allows for a much nicer URL as I was able to get dotspott.com (much more elegant compared to the previous, my.hotspotdot.net).

There’s some minor style changes to the index page. Also, some additional code for some minor improves in user experience, such as auto-focus on input fields when a dialog comes up.

The most significant changes are to the main interface. There’s a new look and you’ll notice support for uploading photos. Also, there’s now a 2-column layout; this avoid the issue of having to keep scrolling down the page to show a new location on the map (which was at the top of the page). The map and header areas are fixed (position: fixed), so as you scroll, only the list of locations on the left will move. I debated whether to do this or to contain the list of locations in a div with overflow:auto or overflow:scroll, so the list would have its own scrollbar, and you wouldn’t scroll the entire page to move up and down the list. I have somewhat of a dislike for both solutions, although one was necessary. I opted for the position:fixed approach because manipulating scrollbars within a page is impossible on a touchscreen device (perhaps we’re at the time where we’ll see the end of overflow:auto and overflow:scroll, along with :hover)

The updated webOS app is almost done. I’m just doing some last minute testing before I put it up in the app store, so I’ll have some info and screenshots up soon.

Edit: h/t to Shifting Pixel for the cool Smart Image Resizer; I really wasn’t feeling up to writing image resizing and caching routines, and this little library was a perfect solution.