Vertex3

Introducing v3MapNotes

I started working on Mobility projects about a year ago when I did some project work with the Enterprise Mobility gurus at Sybase-SQL Anywhere. You might think about Sybase as a database company, but their Waterloo-based division has been working on mobility since blackberries were something you’d eat. I spent some time translating between Sybase and ESRI cultures, and I also built some spatial synchronization capabilities between ArcGIS and SQL Anywhere.

After looking at different development options from Sybase, ESRI, Apple, and Google, it seemed to me like all of the right tools are available, but not really in a form that was as simple and powerful as they should be. Platform differences, offline capabilities, and how to handle the special needs of mapping applications are there in principle, but not in a useful example. That started me on a side project to develop v3MapNotes, which is just an alpha release app right now, but could grow into something over time.

MapNotes eMail example

Using HTML5, Javascript, and a local Sqlite database, v3MapNotes allows users to edit and share notes on a map. It’s different than other apps like Twitter where you tweet and the location is included, with MapNotes you have a map-first application where you click on the map and enter some notes, then you share notes with other users through some server-side KML (Google/Earth XML documents – a well-known standard).

It works pretty well on iPhone/iPad/Android right now, also Chrome on the desktop. On top of some of the local caching capabilities (it stores notes between browser sessions for example), I really thought that HTML5 was going to solve a lot of the fiddling with HTML elements that I’ve done in previous web applications. So far that’s not true, I’ll be looking at options in the coming weeks on how to best manage the UI portion of the app.