Gray's blog

http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html

It’s all there. Prettymuch everything that needs to be replaced. Collective effort anyone?

Let me just start by saying, since the start I have been an android supporter, and have invested a good $1000 or so into the platform as far as phones go.

Anyways, I did not use the ‘official’ rom, I used the rooted Cyanogen Mod. Which just received a cease and desist order from Google. Google’s official response seems to boil down to ‘Android is open, but google apps are not’. The bottomline being the phone doesn’t really function without those apps.

So here’s whats out:
-Contacts Sync
-Maps
-Youtube
-Gmail
-Google Talk
-And last, but most important, the ‘android market’

And anything else not in the android source tree.

Most of the community could probably live without those except android market, after all, the latest maps.apk can be downloaded and installed from android market. Without the market there is no consumer friendly way to install apps on the phone. Ouch.

Some people (Including myself) have kicked around the solution of rebuilding those apps. I personally like that idea and the idea of a ‘google stripped’ android. Most of what they provided could be recreated with public API’s.

It’s just something to think about though, with no real commercial open mobile os, developers are being placed in a walled garden no matter where they go.

I guess it’s a waiting game now for a developer to start the ‘openandroid’ tree or whatever it will be called. But I look forward to the day when that project starts with curiosity.

A funny cartoon, pretty great.

They play reruns on adult swim sometimes, but I’d rather link you to most of the episodes:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Mission+Hill#q=Mission%20Hill&dur=2

Most of them are on google video!

Update:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Mission+Hill+.avi#

that link tends to return some better links :p

http://graymatter.hostkiwi.co.uk/maps_experiment/#

Best viewed with FireFox 3, Fullscreen mode. Search does not seem to work in google chrome and I do NOT expect it to work in IE.

But anyways this was me learning the Google Maps API, GeoCoding and AJAX all in one day, plus some cool UI tricks.

F11 does the fullscreen for firefox 3 on windows btw . Now let’s tear the thing apart:
I used the google maps api (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/) and tried to learn as much as possible. My own code to generate the 3 buttons used. AJAX for the search and google / my code for the ajax search (geosearch.php). That basically created and parsed calls to a geocoder which converted the search query into a latitude / longitude pair. That was then passed in my navigation function thru the XMLHTTP object and then eval’d. So my function would run and navigate it.

A pretty cool way to learn ajax and the maps api huh? I’ll give the source to anyone who is intrested but the page source tells a lot of the story . Great learning experience. I’m gonna go take a look at what other API’s google has .
EDIT:

Screenshot of the original running fullscreen: http://graymatter.hostkiwi.co.uk/supercool.png

before it had supercool stuff