Vacation 2.0

This picture illustrates how my vacation will NOT look like

Yep, it happens also to me, I’m going on a vacation with my family :-)

I remember a few years ago that planning a trip route was involved in opening paper maps all over the floor, marking notes in a traveling book, calling to check availability and making reservations over the phone to find out later that the info was not updated and the zoo moved already to another city…

Today the steps seem differently
· Starting with relevant forums and searching for recommendations on the area you want to travel to.
· Each place has a web site (even if it’s a small guest-house with 2 rooms) in which you can get detailed and updated information.
· Checking availability and making reservation is done online or via email.
· And most impressive is the ability to place the sites on a dynamic map which helps visualize locations, calculate route and make changes on the fly.
As a relative novice planner I’m sure there is much more that could be done (e.g. check traffic, send positions to the GPS…) but for me it was already a nice leap compared to the paper-age.

For that I tried two maps sites – Michelin and Google Maps. It seems that Michelin is richer with more feathers but I liked Google more (less ads, faster…)

However this is not an end-user blog so wearing the developer hat I looked under the hood and understood there are two options for developing using Google Maps:
· Google Maps API – Allows embedding maps in any web site and lets users manipulating them (There is JavaScript version and Flash version)
· Google Mapplets API - Mini-applications that run within Google Maps and add features on top of Google Maps

For the moment I’m spending my time on building the trip although my fingers are tickling to develop something using these APIs (I already found some missing features)

P.S. I updated the Facebook Notify Me app