Maptales at the Ars Electronica

On the 8. September Philipp Wassibauer will be a speaker at the Mission Future Conference at the Ars Electronica in Linz Salzburg. Together with his brother he will be describing the way from the Schmiede (www.schmiede.ca) to Maptales and what is going to come next. Maptales is going to release its 2. Version in Fall 2008, with increased functionality, performance and extensibility for external Websites. The first showcase is www.reisenet.com/welt-entdecken/weltkarte/

First Maptales Business Integration - API Opening Soon

We have just finished the first Maptales Integration into an external Website using the new Maptales API which is going to be released this Summer. You can find it at:

http://reisenet.com/welt-entdecken/meine-weltkarte
http://reisenet.com/welt-entdecken/weltkarte

The API used to make this Product features a Taglib with many features that are similar and as easy to use as the Facebook Markup Language. Using this you can create just the Mapping Applikation you want and leave the rest to us. If you want to become an early beta tester contact us at: contact [at] maptales [dot] com.

Maptales Mobile V1.1 Released

The new version of the Maptales Mobile fixes a few bugs and adds a few features which enable you to do more with your recorded paths on Maptales.com:

• Timestamps of the GPS signal are stored for placing images automatically on Maptales.com
  
• Altitudes of the GPS signal are stored for being displayed on an altitude map on Maptales.com
• Speed of the GPS signal are stored to detect how fast one was moving.
• The Browsing and Uploading screens have been improved.

An example of placing images on the recorded Path can be found at:

http://www.maptales.com/view/10930

SSH Tunnel For Local Facebook and OpenSocial development

One of the frustrating things for me (till now) when developing Facebook and OpenSocial Apps was that I constantly had to redeploy my code to our staging server, since I dont have a static IP and even if I make a reference to my dynamic IP with a service like dyndns.org I would still have to configure my Router so that requests get forwarded to my development machine. Furthermore, if you don't have access to your Router's settings your are out of luck.

Then I found an article about how to make a SSH Tunnel from your staging machine to your local development server.

One thing they don't mention in the article is to check for your Firewall settings on the remote machine. My Port 8090 was blocked, so I had to change the settings for that.

If you are working on Linux or Mac the article explains all the steps you have to go through to get it working. Since I am (still, but not for long anymore) working on a Windows machine I wanted to use something that I already have installed on my computer. So I started up Putty and tried to figure out how to configure it so that it starts up a tunnel. Here are the settings I used to get it working:



To redirect the Port of the Remote Machine you have entered above go to Connection>SSH>Tunnels. Check the Local ports accept connections from other hosts and add a new Forwarded Port by typing:
Source Port: 8090 in my case, but you might as well use another one
Destination: localhost:8080, since I am using Tomcat. Use :80 if you have an Apache running.
Then make sure that you check "Remote", since otherwise the ports are forwarded from your local machine to your Remote Server.


Save all of these Settings so all you have to do next time is to Start Putty, load the Settings and connect to your Remote Server. This will work from everywhere you go now (Starbucks ...) without further configuration.

Now check if the App you are building loads when you type http://my.staging.server.com:8090 into your browser. If yes, go to your Facebook and OpenSocial Apps and change the url.

OpenSocial, at least from Ning.com (I have not tried the others yet, but I will try MySpace and Orkut soon), will only load the Gadget XML file from Port :80. Therefore you have to add a forward from Port 80 to Putty, just like you have done it before with port 8090. Also check that your Apache does not run, since otherwise it is bound to Port :80 already and SSH can't connect.

Maptales at Web2Open Berlin

We are at the Web2Open in Berlin this week, where Flo will give a talk about our nice implementation for editing and creating routes. Web2Open is a free event attached to O'Reillys Web2Expo. If you happen to be in Berlin, come there to say hello!

Audio Upload, KML Upload and Youtube support in Rev. 0.M3.2093!

After a longer period of intensive work on our backend, we released another intermediate version of Maptales yesterday. Despite the fact that we did still not release some of our major new features currently in the making, some notable improvements went into the new release:

• Audio upload
  Audio files up to a size of 24 MB can now be uploaded and placed on Maptales. This way, you can add sounds to your posts or even create audio guides of places and trips. In the feed export, the audio files are added as enclusures (commonly known as "podcasts").
  
• KML upload
  A long requested feature, KML files can be imported into Maptales as the basis for new stories. This feature is currenty in beta and not broadly announced yet, but you can simply use the "Import GPX" link and upload your KML file to Maptales.
  
• Youtube support in Wiki-Syntax
  You can paste links to youtube movies into the text field of your posts, where they will be replaced by the embedded movie.
  
• Improvements for external view
  Besides supporting our new media types (Audios and YouTube movies), the external view that allows you to present your stories on your own website has been improved in many details. Line following works better now, and the automatic showing and hiding of the content pane can be disabled if you wish by passing the URL parameter autoHide=0.
  
• We extended the "guided tour" section on our website and added two cool screencasts showing off the features of our interface. Check them out now!
  
• New tips will guide you through the basic features of our interface.
  
• The new page footer offers links to commonly accessed areas of maptales. We will extend these links in the future and are happy to receive your suggestions for links that should be provided there.
  
• The main navigation toolbar below the map was redesigned - we think it looks really cool now! We will be adding context menus for every "step" there soon.
  

We are currently working on several "special projects" and still more major features. As always, we are happy to receive feedback about the new stuff and suggestions for new features. Have fun!

New layout for external view

With the release yesterday, the layout of the "external view" of stories was greatly improved. This feature allows you to put your stories on your own website or blog, just like an image or YouTube movie. For an example, check out our friend screaming_pep on his bilingual crusade for love:



The new layout should work in a wide range of sizes, from a small 400 by 400 widget to full screen presentations. You find the code to insert in your webpage in the export options of the story overview screen.