Recently I’ve really been enjoying this video series by Google Developers Live. It’s called Make Web Magic, and it is a series of interviews with talented HTML5 developers who have released great work (usually on the Chrome Experiments site). To date there are three interviews on there. The host is Paul Irish (someone who knows what they are talking about) and it is a great way to pick up tips and tricks used by the experts. Check out the videos …
You may have noticed recently that Google have been advertising their Chrome browser on TV. The advert I saw showed a chap called Edward Lewis (fictional I presume) sending emails to his newly born daughter, Hollie. All very cute and sentimental, ahhhh. If you didn’t see it you can watch it on YouTube here.
But you have to feel sorry for poor Mr Lewis (who is doing his best to provide his little girl with a valuable commentary of her early years), because at every turn Google are out to mess with his mind!
First of all he creates a new gMail account for Hollie with the username ‘dear.hollie’, only to find she already has 32 emails waiting for her in her inbox!
Secondly, he has been busy recording special moments of Hollie on his trust camcorder and diligently uploading them to YouTube for her to watch when she is older. We see him logged in to YouTube as ‘Edwardlewis599′ and he has already uploaded 11 clips.
Thirdly, at 42 seconds in, we see Mr Lewis trying to find where he needs to take his princess for her ‘First Day At School’. Obviously, not wanting to turn up at the wrong place he does a search using the Chrome browser address bar for ‘Park Road Primary School’.
And the school that Mr Lewis finds has obviously been taken in to special measures and then closed by OFSTED! Poor Hollie.
But to be honest, it’s lucky he ever found the school on her first day anyway. As Google Maps tells him that the school is located at 10 Park Road, NW4 84W.
Anyone that lives in the NW4 postcode area of London will be able to tell you that they live in Hendon, near the end of the M1 motorway, not Ealing, which is where Google Maps is trying to take him.
In fact, Google Maps doesn’t take poor Edward to Park Road at all. It takes him to Weymouth Ave in Ealing, a whole 9.2 miles (21 minutes) away. Me thinks Hollie is going to be late!
A quick drag of the little yellow man on to the map reveals what the school looks like …
Very impressive!!!
Whereas, on Street Map what we see is …
Not quite as impressive.
Maybe Hollie is actually meant to go to Little Ealing Primary School instead, there has just been an administrative error somewhere along the line …
Ok, let’s suspend disbelief for a little while longer and assume Mr Lewis knows where he has to take his daughter.
Next we see a lovely photo of lovely Hollie with all her school bags ready to go. At the top we can see that he has geotagged the photo with the latitude and longitude …
Last Wednesday (12th Jan 2011) Google released an API for accessing their goo.gl URL shortening service, which is great for web developers. However, for us Flash developers things aren’t quite so simple as it is for everyone else. This is due to the security restrictions imposed when accessing the goo.gl domain. There is a crossdomain policy file at the root of their server (http://goo.gl/crossdomain.xml) but it is very restrictive and of no use to us, causing security errors inside your Flash movie once it has been deployed online.
So I have written an ActionScript class and PHP script which makes the whole process easier for everybody. Here is a demo of it in action …
November 26th, 2012 by 
Adrian 
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