Skip to main content

Girlfriend to fiancée...

       Does this post title "Girlfriend to Fiancée" seem a bit out of place here? Well, actually no! A googler recently had his girlfriend navigate a proposal with Google Maps for mobile.

       Ari Gilder - Software Engineer with Google decided to propose to his girlfriend Faigy. He wanted to do something special and different but also meaningful. And this resulted in his developing a mobile application using Google maps to create an ultimate romantic scavenger hunt!

      Ari wanted Faigy to visit places around New York city that were filled with memories of their relationship. His plan was to construct a map of the route and get Faigy from one destination to another, all with an element of surprise and Google maps provided him the tools to create the magic.

     Ari used Google My Maps to plan out the route - from the Trader Joe's where they shop at on the Upper West Side, to Magnolis Bakery where they spent part of their first date, to Hudson Bar & Lounge where they enjoyed a night of dancing, to Carnegie Hall where Faigy had once surprised him with tickets to a Beethoven concert, all the way to the lighthouse on Roosevelt Island where they had gone on their second date.



     He had secretly coordinated with Faigy's manager at work to give her a Nexus One preloaded with Google Maps for mobile, a camera and instructions to go to the first location. He had a friend stationed at each of the six locations before the final stop to give Faigy a rose, take a picture of her with the roses and to make sure that she checked in with Google Maps. Meanwhile, he anxiously awaited her arrival at the Roosevelt Island lighthouse.



        Faigy's phone had a custom mobile app that Ari had built with the help of his fellow Google engineers Andrew Oplinger and Matt Keoshkerian. The app was built in such a way that it allowed her to check in at each location and then she would be prompted for a password to find out the next location. Ari had provided each of his friend with a question to ask Faigy, tied to their memories of that particular place, the answer to which would be the password. When she would enter the password, the app would automatically initiate walking navigation to the next location.



        When Faigy got to the checkered pin that marked her last destination, her seventh and the final rose came with a question - but this was from Ari and it wasn't an ordinary question. I'll leave it to you readers to guess what Faigy's answer would have been to Ari's question!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments here...

Recommended for You

Playing with the markers and info window bubbles...

    In the last few posts, we have seen some marker examples and some information window examples. Now, lets do something interesting combining these two things. Just writing that "This is an info window" in the information bubble is not very interesting! And I know this...Have gone through the same phase!     So, today we will do something interesting! We will display the latitude- longitude co-ordinates of the point that the user clicks on the map! Doing this is not at all complex! Copy paste the following code and you will see for yourself a map coming to life!     The output of the above code looks as seen in the result section above! If you have any queries regarding the above code please comment on the blog post or feel free to contact me at my mail ID .
3 comments
Read more

Ground Truth - How Google Builds Maps

    Todays's article is cross posted from The Atlantic 's Tech section. The article was posted by Alexis Madrigal who is a senior editor at The Atlantic , where he oversees the Technology channel. So, thanks to The Atlantic and Alexis Madrigal, we will have an exclusive look inside Ground Truth , the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps.     Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works.     Google opened up at a key moment in its evo...
6 comments
Read more

Google Street View Image API

    Street View is one of most used feature of the Google Maps and why not? You can actually see any part of the world as if you are visiting the place at that very moment. And now with the Google Street View Image API, you don't even need to carry a camera with you to the places you visit. You can take-in all the scenic beauty without even bothering about clicking a single picture. You can come back from your vacation and get a few images using the Google Street View Image API and show those images to your friends and relatives. Create an album of high definition images and go ahead and share it on Facebook for your friends to have a look.     Using the Google Street View Image API is very simple and anybody can make use of it without any programming knowledge required. I will walk you through the entire process of effectively using the Google Street View Image API. So if you are set, let's go on an amazing ride across the globe with the Google Street Views. ...
1 comment
Read more

The Bicycling Layer...

    Recreational cyclists and bike commuters alike can plot cycle-friendly routes, find trails, and avoid snarling traffic with Google Map's Bicycle layer. Map's bike-friendly, green-toned map layer is very eye-pleasing. The Google Maps API allows you to add bicycle information to your maps using the BicyclingLayer object.     The BicyclingLayer renders a layer of bike paths, suggested bike routes and other overlays specific to bicycling usage on top of the given map. Additionally, the layer alters the style of the base map itself to emphasize streets supporting bicycle routes and de-emphasize streets inappropriate for bicycles.     Let us have a look at the following example. The code has a map which is centered at Pune, India. There are very few cycle tracks in Pune and so you will see just a few dark green lines on the map. But if you would change the latitude-longitude values in the code and center the map at USA, then you will see a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Difference between word-break: break-all versus word-wrap: break-word

    The 2 CSS properties  word-break: break-all  and  word-wrap: break-word  appear to work in the same way or generate the same output, but there is a slight difference between the 2 and we will be discussing these differences today.     Take a look at the example above. The difference is quite evident, however I will try to explain it further. word-break: break-all Irrespective of whether it’s a continuous word or many words, break-all breaks them up at the edge of the width limit even within the characters of the same word word-wrap: break-word This will wrap long words onto the next line. break-word adjusts different words so that they do not break in the middle.     So if you have many fixed-size spans which get content dynamically, you might just prefer using  word-wrap: break-word , as that way only the continuous words are broken in between, and in case it’s a sentence comprising many words, the spa...
Post a Comment
Read more