Andrew Powell

Inspiration comes from all places. Sitting in Ryan Stewart's presentation at 360Flex this week, I got hit with the geolocation bug again. I saw some of the demos that Ryan was doing and figured that I can take some of those a bit further. This gave me a chance to do some work with HTML 5 and AIR for Android as well.

Seeing Ryan's presentation, I took the initiative and updated one of my old samples around Yahoo! Local Search and Adobe Spry. The old version actually asked you to provide a city state pair to do the local search. After taking a look at how Serge Jespers was using an ExternalInterface call to get HTML5 geolocation data into Flash, I took the same approach to grab the latitude and longitude from the HTML5 geolocation API and pass it into the ColdFusion service that I'm using to abstract the Yahoo! API. The end result, which works in any HTML5 enabled browser looks like this:

Migrating this example to HTML5 was cool, but I felt like there was still something missing. I banged out the HTML5 version pretty quickly because I was migrating existing code. I needed a real challenge. Ryan's examples had all been based in AIR for Android. I had been signed up for the prerelease for a while, but hadn't been able to think of a compelling app to build. I decided to take the HTML5 app that I had just created and build an AIR for Android version, so I fired up IntelliJ IDEA and went for it. I figured a listing of the elements wouldn't be a good showing of what AIR for Android can do, so I decided to sexy it up a bit. I added in some nifty native geolocation functionality and some of the new uri based functionality to trigger the phone system, i.e. tel:4045551212. Since it was a Flex 4 application, I decided to use my Flex framework of choice, Swiz, to help me build the application quickly and keep my code organized. I picked up a beer from the 360Flex party on Tuesday night and then headed to my hotel room to crank out some code. The result isn't pretty, but it is pretty darn cool.

When the application starts up, it will check for the current location and center the map on that latitude and longitude. When you do a search, it will call the same ColdFusion service that the HTML5/AJAX version is using to get the local search results. It then leverages the MapQuest 6 API to plot the data. I added a double-click handler on the POIs to trigger phone calls to a given location.

Download the APK here. Warning, it's still just a POC quality, so you may need to force quit the application to keep it from eating all of your battery.