This weekend, my wife and I were able to go on our first vacation away from our kids for more than a few hours. And by the first time, I mean since we had our firstborn child. So, something like 5 years.
Anyway, we ended up going to Chicago and spending the whole weekend there, since we’ve never really been, even though we’ve lived close enough to go for almost a decade.
When we got there, there was plenty of times that we sat down in a coffee shop or some place with wifi, and wanted to find out how to get to a specific place from there, but didn’t know exactly where we were. So instead of pulling out my clunky iPhone, I whipped out my Mac and wrote this nifty little app, called CurrentLocation (ZIP file).
Basically it just loads your Current Location (just like iPhone) into Google Maps in your preferred browser (mine being Safari 4). It’ll ask your permission, first, which is neat and unusual to see on a Mac. (It requires Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard, to work, since it uses the Core Location framework.)
The loading window is pretty basic, just showing a radar (which animates, although you can’t see that in the screenshot). Once it’s done opening google maps at your location, the app terminates itself.
The app is free, and might soon be open-sourced. I hope it helps some other weary travelers as much as it helped us!
Wow. Just wow. It gets my location with a precision of nearly 100m. That is amazing, good job! Could you enlighten us as to how this works?