After the iPhone GPS announcement and playing golf with my dad last week, I had an idea for an iPhone application that someone needs to put together (because I don’t have the time). The cart that dad and I had had GPS and hole layouts displayed. We’d pull up to the ball, get the yardage, and select our club accordingly. It was very cool.
A couple of weeks ago, I was driving somewhere and wanted to see a list of restaurants and gas stations that were nearby along my route. My car can display the POI (points of interest) on the map, but can’t list them out.
Both of those features would be very cool to have on the 2nd-generation iPhone with built-in GPS. I got to thinking and had an idea for an application that could handle both features and be Web 2.0-y. There would be 3 parts: a map display on the iPhone, a map display on the web, and a database. The iPhone interface would show your location on Google Maps. An “Add POI” button would ask, “Where is the POI located?” with three options: current location, select location, and enter address. Current location would use your current lat/long, select location would allow you to select a lat/long point on the map, and enter address would get the lat/long from an address (after locating it through Google Maps). Then, you would enter the POI name, a short description, and several searchable tags, then pick an icon and/or snap a picture of the POI. When you save the POI, it would call a webservice on the server and save the POI. When you load the map view, you enter your search criteria to view the nearby POI. When a POI is selected, it would display the distance from your current location (units of measure would be an option: feet, meters, yards, km, miles, etc). You could also view them in a list, ordered by distance.
I’m not sure how to do the POI along a route, though. I guess you could plot the route, then search POI at certain intervals and display them that way.
Anybody got the developer chops to do something like that? Most of the hard work would be on the web server end, since the webservices would handle most of the heavy lifting (searches, uploads, etc). The iPhone application would just be a front-end that leverages the location functions of the device. Or perhaps the web-side is already done somewhere?
