Attaching a title to a position on Google Maps

Avishkar Autar · Sep 21 2010 · Web Technologies

One of the neat little things I discovered when doing the hotspotdot webOS app is how to show the custom, user-entered title of the location, as shown below.

Google map location on webOS

This is done by specifying the title in the query, in parentheses, after the coordinates. The full, escaped query URL for the location above is as follows:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.7044120969184,-73.99009709643556%28Empire%20Fulton%20Ferry%20State%20Park%29

The Javascript code for the webOS app would look something like this (latlong and title are variables that hold the latitude, longitude coordinate pair and title, respectively):

this.controller.serviceRequest("palm://com.palm.applicationManager", {
    method: "open",
    parameters: {
        id: "com.palm.app.maps",
        params: {
            query: escape(latlong) + "%28" + escape(title) + "%29"
        }
    }
});

This works in the browser as well, so the URL shown above would display the following,

custom title on Google maps position