OT (?): Bookmarking GPS coords

[Kay C Lan]

On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode
<use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> I'm looking for any help or suggestions for existing apps that can do
> (something like) what I want to do - could even be a clever way to use a
> feature I've not found in Google maps, or pple maps, or ...
>
Hi Alex, I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to achieve but here
is a scenario that might address some of your needs:

You have a local Scout group and you want all the children in the
group to know where all the other kids and group leaders live so you
want to produce a map with place markers that can be easily shared.

So I'd get all the kids to go home, get onto Google Maps and find
their own home using Street View. Once they've found their home, they
take a copy of the URL and have them email it to you. The entire URL
will look like this:

https://www.google.com.au/maps/@52.7810059,-1.7254772,3a,75y,38.54h,87.5t,358.22r/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sNB14D3D9SvOQvL8Efe9h8w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1

The format is pretty straight forward to decipher, the two numbers
directly after the @ is the latitude and longitude. It would be easy
to write an LC utility to strip the address to just the Lat and Long.

Take this Lat and Long and paste it into Google Earth. Note I started
out in "Maps" because of Street View - it is much easier to find your
own home in Maps vs Earth. Obviously pasting the Lat Long into Earth
will take you to exactly the same spot. In Earth you can then place
multiple 'Placemarkers' and give them appropriate names and
descriptions - that are like pop up tooltips. I'd name the
Placemarkers after the kid's name, and for the description enter their
proper address.

Once you've entered all the Placemarker details, you can scale your
view to cover just the area that includes all your Placemarkers. You
can then save this as a .kmz file and send it out to everyone. When
anyone opens the file they'll see exactly what you saw when you saved
it; but it doesn't preclude them from zooming in and out or panning
around.

Google Earth is available on all the popular desktop and mobile OSes
and is free.

Lastly, .kmz files are basically an xml file as defined by Google.
Again the format is pretty simple to decipher - or you could look it
up on the internet and have it precisely described to you. I would
think it would be relatively simple to define a procedure (less simple
to have the kids actually follow it) where the kids send you an email
with the body is in a format like:

URL: qerpoqueoruqweouqeoruqoru
Your fullname: oiu lh mnbmb
Your Full address: 765 hohjjkl jhgjgh ouyiuy UYT 432 FHG

and then have LC read the email, extract the relevant data and then
automatically add the Placemarker data into the .kmz file. One problem
I see is that someone might join who lives outside the original zoomed
level of your custom kmz map so with each update to the kmz file you
would have to actually open it and look at it in Google Earth and
determine that the zoom level is correct to ensure that everyone is
still within the bounds of display; before saving the file and sending
it out as an update to everyone.

Also, Google Earth allows you to create your own 'Tracks' that can be
saved and shared. So for instance, you could save a Scout hiking trip
and share it and so parents would know where to drop kids off and pick
them up, and theoretically the kids can't get too lost on the route in
between;-)

HTH