MapShake v 1.0 preview is available here (:don’t forget to put your loudspeakers at maximum and do not hesitate to ‘shake your body’ while watching.. ..and yes ..shake your maps too ! :)
…Feb 2010 update covering friends maps and WMS overaly over the Google maps
My student Jiri Kaminek, who is in first year of postgraduate study at department of Applied Geoinformatics at Mendel University has created in very short time an impressive prototype for accessing WMS layers within iPhone using native iPhone SDK. It looks very promissing, with natural iPhone gestures, ability to access iPhone resources (tile cache, GPS position, history, etc..) . You can see his presentation on http://mapserver.mendelu.cz/iphonelayers together with sample screencasts. Codename of the project is iPhoneLayers. The big picture is that MapShake will store all map compositions and you will have various frontedns how to consume or shake your maps, iPhone will be one possible outlet where based on your current GPS position you will get your pre-shaked maps from MapShake store.
Update November 2009: Application is called Whatevermap and can be downloaded from AppStore. please check following category on this blog:
I was trying recently to utilize bookmarklets for injection of custom code into arbitrary webpage to get control a provide some additional funcitonality.. for example transfering the content of openlayers maps into MapShake. Not heard about MapShake ? I will post soon more. My bookmarlet looks like this:
javascript:(function(){var%20s=document.createElement(%22script%22);s.charset=%22UTF-8%22;s.src=%22http://www.sumbera.com/lab/MapRip/MapRip.js%22;document.body.appendChild (s)})();
try{
var rippedMap = map;
var format = new OpenLayers.Format.WMC({‘layerOptions’: {buffer: 0}});
var text = format.write(rippedMap);
var w;
setTimeout(‘w=window.open(“”,”",”width=600,height=1200,resizable=0,scrollbars=1″);e(w);’,10);
function e(w){
d = w.document;
d.write(“<textarea id=’wmc’ rows=’100′ cols=’65′>” + text +”</textarea>”);
d.close();
w.focus()
}
Recently I was interested in caching WMS requests on MapSnack, that would allow off-line usage of WMS sources. Unfortunately there is no functional WMS discovery or search engine. Google is very weak in this area and even inurl: doesn’t bring too many results. There is one paper I found on this topics called “OpenGIS WMS-based prototype system of Spatial Information Search Engine” but to access this paper you nee to login to IEEE. pages. So how to help google to index WMS layers and pictures it produce ? one of the thoughts I have is to create simple set of pages on which each request for certain layer for certain zoom level and in particular tile would be referenced. Tiling is important as “sampling frequency” for the WMS cache. Actually last year I was working on prototype which enabled me to save for offline use WMS tiled layers (refer to http://www.sumbera.com/news/mapajax/mapajax.htm) what was missing was an automatic crawler on the area and layers – the saving was done only by manual navigation in the area. Last note : I expect the shift of the google search engine towards this freely available geospatail content (…. just right after I will start to generate my index pages ;)
I’ve tested AJAX based approach for displaying maps on web page. I took sample area north to Brno 20x 20 km covered by various geodata including VHR IR images. I had to intercept HTML requests to map server to see what it takes to generate map of particular range and layer. (I had no access to map server, nor I took care what mapping engine serves maps, but it was not in format of WMS). I found quite simple prototype of AJAX display on mike page and I bend it little bit to work with geographicaly referenced maps (actually I needed JTSK system used here in Czech Republic). Conclusion is that AJAX approach for map display has lot of potential since is is elegant, extensible and transparent for end user (just save your page and you may run locally your client or include your client on your own page. Also more about AJAX vs. Flas approach for map displaying see David Blasby’s blog On my sample you may zoom in/out and pan. In zoom level 4 you will get IR aerial images. tested on IE6 and NN6.
enjoy it… 
