8Motions blog

I will be in the next “Mobile Bar Camp” in Paris, Saturday the 13th of October, organized by Philippe Jeudy and Louis Van Proosdij. Will be in French, but imprevissive list of participant. If you want to chat with me, drop me an email.

In French, from “Trans-Id” blog: 8Motions: donnez toutes les cartes à votre mobile

Thanks a lot!

Big news: 8Motions (the J2memap successor) support now translation. For new, english, french and russian are supported.

First, thanks to Andrew Petrov who made the Russian traduction of the client. So we are looking for more translator. The process is fairly easy: just download this CSV file, and use a plain text editor, or eventually excel or open office to edit it and add a new column with your language, and send me back the result at 8motions@gmail.com

The translation file for the monbile is here: http://www.8motions.com/res/lang.csv
while the one for the web is here, but just started: http://www.8motions.com/res/languageWeb.csv

And don’t be shy, put your name in the “trans_author” line to be added into the credit list!

Update:

Thanks to Wilfred Chan and “king midi” for their help in the chineese traduction, both on the handset and the web site. I did not experimented yet with Chineese, so I am not sure that the web site will switch automatically in Chineese, I will add soon a popup to select the lange directly from the web site.

The j2memap forum moved to my new hosting, and is now under phpBB3. Hopefully, there is not anymore manual confirmation, the new default phpBB3 capcha, so I hope that this will be enough to stop spammers….

This post will be both in French and English, as it’s “Paris Centric”

Pour demontrer certaines des capacités du moteur de “Mapz”, une petite extension Velib a été crée. Elle permet de voir les stations les plus proches de l’endroit ou vous trouvez, ainsi que le status (nombre de vélos libre) de cette station. La grande nouveauté est que cette extension peut utiliser le GPS interne ou externe (via Bluetooth) de votre téléphone si vous en disposez. Ceci devrait fonctionner parfaitement sur un Nokia N95 par exemple
De plus, elle affiche aussi la carte SUR le mobile, afin de mieux visualiser ou ce trouve cette sation.

Pour l’obtenir, clickez sur le lien ci-dessus, et télécharger le client sur mobile. Si l’affichage ne demarre pas tout seul, allez dans “Mapz” et choisissez “Velib”

To demonstrate the capacities of the “Mapz” engine, a small extension has been created this week end. It allows you to see the nearest Velib station. Velib is a smart system put in place in Paris (and some other cities) where you can reat a bike for some hour in a “station”. You can then give back the bike to another “station”. The issue, for Parisian, is to find the nearest station, and to know if there is a free bike available at the station.
Thanks to Velib map, they are now able to do this!

Identificateurs Technorati : n95, gps, mobile, velib, map

Some snapshot of one of the new effect to be introduced in the new client version: a cool “iTune” like effect. Will not be available on all browsers, but look quite cool….Hope to have a screen cast soon.

Identificateurs Technorati : j2memap, itune

Looking for beta testers of the new version ofJ2memap, named “8Motions”. Far from what will be the final release, but enough to play a little bit! So just go to http://www.8motions.com and let me know what happends with your phone.

This feature a great new Ruby On Rail server side, the ability to create your map (or import them) and download them on your mobile, and more to be discovered later on…..

Part of the server used to host J2memap dev tools and 8motions are migrating today. If you still encounter some issues let me know.

MGMaps, another provider of free mobile mapping software has been forced to remove the GoogleMap support of his software.

Sad news. For j2memap, I’ve been trying to contact GoogleMap and the Microsft several times, to get an agreement with them to use more “legally” their map. Only Microsoft answered, but the offering was at that point (beginning of this year) not really mature. Google never answered despite several letter to different people….

Note that if you use the “proxy mode”, the Google statellite tiles might not appear because their proxy is blocking a single platform (mine) to do too many request per day (too many does not seems to be very big, something like 1000 requests)….

Technorati Tags: mgmaps, google maps, mobile, maps

Just a short reminder, about what is supported as type of file for j2memap (both the library and the program):

- .loc

Used by geocaching application

- .gpx

Used by many gps related program. A subset of GPX1.1 is available, mainly include support for waypoint, trackpoint, track, ….

- .kml

Google Earth format (and used by many mapping application).

viewformat
viewrefreshmode
name
styleurl
style
iconstyle
color
coordinates

and a few others

- geoRSS

The following geoRSS tag are supported:
geo:lat
geo:long
georss:point
georss:line

(note that pubdate ,title and description are displayed)

- Others XML variant

As I’ve made a lot of interconnection with various XML providers, there are much more tags supported, a few of them:
address  : the address of the point
tel         : telphone number (usefull, as you have the ability to call this number directly)
photoUrl

So it’s already an impressive list, that can help you to create or use some cool mashup.

Also, as a new features, if the description contains an img reference, this description is displayed as an icon,like this:

And remember, as you have the ability to load KML created by Google MyMaps, you just can load them directly, like this one:

Another example, with different markers:

Technorati Tags: j2memap, 8motions, kml, mobile, gmap, gmap mobile, gpx, mymaps, where