Slashgeo

The iPhone OS 3.0 was announced yesterday and, without surprises, it includes several new capabilities that makes it important in the location-based services mobile devices world. If you want a good overview of what's new or improved, see Tidbits. What's in there more specifically for geospatial? The O'Reilly Radar runs a story named "What the iPhone 3GS and 3.0 OS Means for Geo Devs", mentioning TomTom has a turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone. APB runs an entry about Intermap bringing their DEMs to the iPhone. There was a Slashdot discussion named "Using the iPhone As a Pointing Device For the Real World" but that was just before the actual announcement. Slashdot inevitably discussed the iPhone OS 3.0 afterwards. I expect to see more iPhone geonews on the geoblogs in the coming weeks. See also recent related stories below.

The Geoweb Guru blog has news about this recent announcement from Mapquest. Here is part of their summary : "MapQuest have just announced an iPhone version of their MapQuest 4 Mobile application. This application performs the usual consumer mobile map activities: eg. find places, give directions, locate "landmarks" (fast food, etc)."

Here's the recent geonews in batch. There's a new release of the open source geometry engine GEOS, now at version 3.1.1. There's an essay on the comparison of the most suitable single multi-purpose map projections out there, with a focus on Fuller and Cahill map projections. There's an hour-long interview about Bing Maps internals. All Points Blog informs us about Garmin and Linux, conclusion: forget it for now. The iPhone supports location sharing in its browser. There's even a pay-as-you-go iPhone turn-by-turn app, VS informs us most major navigation companies are going to the iPhone, plus there's surprising augmented reality such as Layar (also for Android). You can now talk to Android maps. Henri Bergius argues that browser geolocation without GPS is quite accurate enough, this all related to GeoClue and Gnome's Empathy. Mapperz has an entry named OpenStreetMap & FireFox 3.5 (RC1) Geolocation. Off the Map tested Google Table Fusion for geospatial capabilities (mentioned last week). If you're looking for a map of Tehran, use OpenStreetMap or Google. TMR shares an entry on mapping of North Korea, FGT also discusses topographic maps of North Korea. There's a NYC interactive homicide map. On the ESRI front, there's a whitepaper on ArcGIS Server and virtualisation. SA continues on his critics of the ESRI Web ADF 9.3. GWG offers a two-parts article on Plug & Play Maps, a free tool to design thematic maps. Ed Parsons informs us SPOT Image is ambitious with their future satellite launches. The EiS offers an entry on 3D building in NASA World Wind. You can see this example of using Google Earth for urban development projects. SS shares an interesting NASA interactive Climate Time Machine. There are a bunch of new cities in Google Transit and Refugee mapping efforts. APB has several entries on Integraph recently, one on GeoMedia 6.1 and an entry about Loran has funds now and will stay alive for some more time. See also some related stories below or perform a search.