Pinpoint Maritime location with mobile device (Android & iPhone) - google-maps

I'm looking to build a mobile app that needs to locate the user maritime position and present it on a map.
My questions is what kind of precision can I expect and if someone has done something similar and what unexpected pitfalls can I encounter.
Also, is there any solution to work around the potential lack of internet connectivity and map loading?
Ideally I'm looking at using the device geolocation with google maps but I've come accross these and I'm not sure if it can give me greater precision:
http://www.navionics.com/en/web-api
Thanks

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How can one configure OpenLayers to allow unlimited zooming

We are experimenting with using OpenLayers within a PHP application that displays data from PostgreSQL/PostGIS and GeoServer.
The initial use of OpenLayers is terrific except for one problem:
A lot of our data has very small extent eg < 0.1m.
When we zoom in to look at the features they disappear.
We have read the documentation, looked for examples, tried setting zoom values > 19 but to no avail.
There are NO scale thresholds in the SLD so this is not the issue.
Can anyone suggest how to get around this? Is there a NO-LEVELs mode for OpenLayers as we are not interested in mimicking Google Maps etc.

How to start an embedded kml tour?

This is my first post, wooohooo! I've been using stack exchange when I needed information but usually someone had the same problem as me and I didn't need to make a post. Which means this website is really good.
Now turns out I have a pretty unique problem.
Please check out http://gaia.tru.ca/birdMOVES/
You will see a website with a google map. It is connected to a db which will be automatically updated.
The purpose of this website is to track how birds feed. There is going to be bird feeders equipped with NFC all over the world to track birds equipped with RFID when they feed.
I am taking care of the front-end, the web app for visualizing.
This is a work in progress so try not to care about the looks of it.
Apparently everything was written in RApache because the person who made everything this far is a Geography teacher(Not a lot of programming background, I had to refactor his code and learn R because it wasn't in my array of known languages.)
My client asked me to add time animation to his map. Feasible with the help of Google Earth.
I made the existing R code generate a tour. It works perfectly and even shows on my map.
Here is the address of my dev server: http://thelab.dyndns.org:1080/birdmoves/
You can see that there is an extra check box for time animation. If you check it, the tour will appear as an object on the map (no way to use it whatsoever right now).
So what I'd like to know is how do I make it work? How do I make it autoplay when the submit button is pressed? With standard google earth controls for rewind, pause and fast-forward. And independently from the google maps without tour?
This is intense. I have the feeling google earth isn't going to work because they deprecated all their gadgets.
I'm on the clock and I need help.
In case you were wandering what eventually happened:
We ended up making a hybrid website where the static visualization is within Google maps using kml and the time animation is within CesiumJs using CZML.
CZML is based off JSON and can be used very similarly to kml.
The api is also very nice, it only takes one line of javascript code to get a map running on an existing server.
To implement time visualization CZML supports putting multiple consecutive values for almost any property(like position, to animate movement, or even color to change colors) and takes account of time.
Also very nice, CesiumJs supports animated 3d models!
If you're interested http://cesiumjs.org/
It also has a lot of support, documentation and tutorials... etc..
It's being maintained by professionals. I really recommend it.
The Google Earth API got deprecated and will not function by December this year which is not a viable option for a long term service. So cesium was the only option for this specific project.
Cheers

Get landmark coordinates near the map centre

Using the windows phone 8 map control I want to be able to collect a list of all the landmarks/points of interest within a radius of a given point (mainly my map centre). I have looked at other questions on this site but they are either geared toward Android or suggestions I tried that did not pan out. I tried online but there does not seem to be a definitive method for achieving this on windows phone 8.
Does anyone know of a service/api, that has been shown to work in the method described above, that I could leverage to solve my problem?
You can do it in Windows Phone 8 Map control. You have to set LandmarksEnabled property of the map control to true. Here it is:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/microsoft.phone.maps.controls.map.landmarksenabled%28v=vs.105%29.aspx

Improve touchscreen handling on Chrome

I am working on a web app that will be run off a local server on Windows 8 on Chrome. Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't seem to handle touch events very well. For example, often instead of clicking on a button, it will select it instead. Is there any way I can make it behave more like native touchscreen apps do?
I can't make it a metro app because I need to talk to a Python service.
I've done some testing in Chrome with a touch screen and don't seem to run into this issue (of course not doubting you are though!). If you have a site I'd be more than happy to check it out.
One option is to try scaling the content larger, I'm wondering if your touch surface is very sensitive to tiny movements upon touch and treating it as a touch/scroll ie select. Try a simple test in the browser to start by increasing the size before trying any css scaling transforms (which I'm not sure how in this how well that approach would even work)
What type of hardware is it being tested on?
Can you elaborate a bit more on the python service? What part of the service makes it so you can't interact with it? Is it just an http service object or something else?

How to force a Blackberry device to use GPS positioning in stead of cell triangulation in an HTML5 app?

We are doing some tests with HTML 5 geolocation and our code already works really well on Android and iPhone browsers: we get a continuous update of our precise position on Google maps. You can check our code here: http://93.113.255.166/testHTML5.htm
We also want to make this code work on a Blackberry device, the 9780 Bold with Blackberry 6.0 O.S., but it doesn't work as we would like. The position you get is a rough one, probably calculated through cell triangulation, and there is no precise position displayed. The position is most of the time some 300-400m wrong.
It's clear that the GPS positioning of the phone isn't used, because when you try the native Blackberry positioning apps, you get a very precise position.
We also use the enableHighAccuracy: true attribute in the code: this helps for the iPhone and Android browsers, but not for Blackberry browsers.
So it seems that we are unable to force the device to use the GPS. Is there anybody who could help us? Thanks!
Kristof
I don't know if this can help, but I have a problem using geolocation with Blackberry os6 using 3G; it works as designed (cell triangle if GPS hasn't fix) using GPRS, 3G with WiFi, GPRS with WiFi, but NOT using 3G alone.
My carrier is Vodafone Italy, but I read other people using os6 have the same problem. Obviously it works when GPS has fixed.
Reading around it seems it is a carrier problem, not a BB firmware problem, but I haven't any way to test roaming at the moment.
Looking at the BB log it seems it switches from BIS to wap when asking position, but then it is not able to reconnect BIS like os5 does (try with Google Maps on BB).
I have exactly the same problem. No matter if I set enablehighaccuracy to true of false, the phone always gives rough location. But GPS tool gives accuracy results.
A temporary way to solve this is to disable cell connection for couple of minutes. Then test your site again. If it can get accurate location, you can turn cell connection back on and the location will always be accurate till next reboot.