Posts Tagged ‘map’

Geoloqi Now Detects Nearby Pinball Machines

Geoloqi Pinball Layer Geolocation

Geoloqi has a new layer that is going to make your coin jars a lot more empty.

When we’re not working (which we love to do), we also love to play pinball. It turns out (we only recently found this out) that the city we live and work in is one of the top pinball cities in America). There’s a great website called the Pinball Map that (using crowdsourcing) keeps track of the pinball machines in cities all over the country. They also have a a great iPhone and Android app so you can update and find machines (Scott Wainstock and Ryan Gratzer worked on the apps and the Pinball Map site, and did a great job with them).

Geoloqi Pinball Geo Notification

We wanted to see if we could use Geoloqi to automatically let us know when we were near a bar with pinball machines. So we combined the Pinball Map data with Geoloqi, and the result is the Geoloqi Pinball Machine Detector!

How it works: When you walk by a venue that has a pinball machine, Geoloqi automatically detects it and sends you a message, which has the name of the venue, and the names of all the pinball machines. We tried it out recently, and it was great. We first found a bar with CSI and the new Batman pinball machine, both of which were only a week old (the Pinball Map data is remarkably up-to-date).

Next we walked by the Shanghai Tunnel, a bar in downtown Portland, which had five machines in the basement. The machines weren’t visible from the road, so I would have never known about them without the Pinball layer. I’ve found a lot of great new places to stop in and visit since I started using it. It’s surprising how many hidden gems you can find, even in the neighborhood you live in.

We also found a really odd Elton John pinball machine (Captain Fantastic) in the shoe store across from Powell’s (a big bookstore in downtown Portland). We’ve walked by it hundreds of times, and still had no idea it was there.

Pinball Map Site

The layer only took a few hours to build, and it was very easy to implement. It’s my favorite layer for Geoloqi right now (the Dinosaur Fossils layer is a close second). I was able to use our visual Layer Editor to track and view progress while the script was importing. It’s a lot of data, but our front-end designer/developer (Patrick Arlt) was able to use our Javascript SDK to make direct calls to the API from our editor, which improves performance a lot, so even with a lot of data, the layer editor works great. It makes a big difference to be able to see the data you’re working with!

Geoloqi Pinball Map Layer

Anything with geo-location can be made into a layer like this. We’ve been having a lot of fun implementing these, and we’re always looking for more ideas and datasets to import in the future. If you have any ideas in mind, you should send them to us (or better yet, make your own layer!).

Geoloqi Pinball Notification

Where does it work?

If you’re in any of the following cities, you can use this layer to get Pinball notifications!
Austin, San Francisco, Boston, British Columbia, Chicago, Colorado, Dallas, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, New York City, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, Spokane

Try it Out!

Download the Geoloqi app and subscribe to the Pinball layer! It’s free.. unlike the pinball machines.

Top photo credit: Creative Commons by Flickr User BeerNotBombs

Posted

Sat Nov 19 2011, 12:12pm

By caseorganic

Categories

Features

Tagged

Geoloqi – Now with GPX Export!

Geoloqi with GPX Export

At the request of many, we’ve added GPX Export functionality to data in Geoloqi! Now you can export GPX data from the history tab on the map page in your Geoloqi account, as well as directly from the API.

What is GPX?

GPX (the GPS Exchange Format) is a light-weight XML data format for the interchange of GPS data (waypoints, routes, and tracks) between applications and Web services on the Internet. GPX has been the de-facto XML standard for lightweight interchange of GPS data since the initial GPX 1.0 release in 2002.

Downloading GPX from your profileGeoloqi with KML and GPX Export
Simply log into Geoloqi and click on the History tab.

You’ll see two options: Download KML and Download GPX.

Downloading GPX data from the Geoloqi API
Add location/history.gpx to the end of the call to download GPX.

You can see more history options in the Geoloqi API Documentation.

Posted

Sat Apr 2 2011, 2:14pm

By caseorganic

Categories

Features
News
Tutorials

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New! Embed a Geoloqi map on your site or blog with a custom widget!

If you’re a food cart, tour group, cyclist, canvasser, or any other type of person who might benefit from sharing your location, you can now embed a Geoloqi map on your site!

Here’s how to do it!

Embedding a Geoloqi Map on your site or blog

Go to your map screen in Geoloqi and click on the “Share Link”.

When the link is created, click on the embed icon </> to the right of the link.

The embed code will automatically be created! You can customize the size by any sort of pixels you’d like. To include a live updating map on your site, simply copy and paste the embed code into your HTML! 

Embedding a map into a WordPress page or blog post is easy. Note that you can only embed Geoloqi maps into your own hosted WordPress website and not a wordpress.org site. Simply click on the HTML button in your post editor and paste in the embed code. You can change the dimensions in code if you’d like your map to be larger or smaller.

When you publish your post you’ll see your map! Visitors to your site will be able to watch you in real time. If you turn off your tracker they won’t be able to see your location anymore!

Embed a Map into a WordPress Widget!

To embed a map into a WordPress widget, simply copy and paste the embed code into the widget editor in your WordPress account or site. Click “Save” and load your site to see the map!

Here’s what a sample Geoloqi map in a side widget on a WordPress site:

Privacy

Worried about privacy? Don’t worry, when you turn off the Geoloqi tracker the map will turn blank and won’t show your current location.

Enjoy using Geoloqi! If you embed a map in your site let us know! We’d love to see it.