Mindsizzlers LLP

We're working on a consumer project at the moment that makes heavy use of mapping technologies. We built the project with google maps, but ran into a deal breaker where placemark links in parsed KML always open in a new browser window, rather than the same window that is sometimes preferable.

Google seem to have acknowledged this is an issue, but they acknowledged it 2 years ago and have done nothing since - presumably for their own good reason - however for someone developing tools against the API, it can be a real headache.

Enter the open source community and a great product by Lance Dyas called GeoXML which is a new parser you can use for KML files (and much more) within the Google Maps API. And the BEST feature ... well for us, it DOES allow you to open links in placemark info windows in the SAME browser window. Great!

Beware that sadly the project lacks any real documentation and getting started can be rather hard. The documentation for another project EGeoXML is a useful starting point.

We're a fan of Amazon cloud computing and have been using SimpleDB within some projects that we will be launching soon. The problem though is that there is no backup solution for the service and whilst Amazon's redundancy etc means that we should never lose any data anyway, that doesn't protect you against the accidental deletion of data (been there, done that) or the desire to have data in files that you can import into other databases (eg Mysql)etc.

I was a bit surprised that this hadn't been addressed by the Amazon community at large so I took a few days (well, a week) out of my schedule to pull together www.backupsdb.com - the world's first online backup solution for Amazon SimpleDB.

We launched it last week and you can read more over at the backupsdb blog

There's a rather neat mapping tool over at http://www.quikmaps.com/ which allows you to doodle on google maps and draw trails, add markers etc. We liked it so much that we're using it in a new site we're working on but this week we hit a problem when adding marker text caused hangs and crashes.

The author of the tool has gone on to pastures new and seems hard to track down, so it was down to us to come up with a solution if we wanted to keep our project on track.

Detailed analysis of the google maps groups led Roger to discover that only this week, google had deprecated use of any api version prior to 2.140 and it transpired that quikmaps was developed with version 2.(0)50 although we had it running with 2.(0)85. This was a clue, and reading through the change logs for each api version gave a further clue with the discovery that the markerinfowindow code had been taken out of the main google maps api and modularised so it would load on demand ... in theory!

The way that quikmaps manipulates the DOM with prototype meant that the google api wasn't realising that the markerinfowindow module was in fact being demanded and so the solution turns out to be to force the map to pull in the infowindow module by simply adding in editor.map.getInfoWindow().show() after the map is instantiated in the browser.

Full details here;

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/browse_thread/thread/77feb23b5f004dac#

Mindsizzlers, what's that all about then? Well, back in the autumn of 2008, Stu & I decided to leave ChilliBean, the company I founded some 5 years ago. The plan was to leverage our expertise into new areas and when we were looking for a name for the venture, serendipity struck - let me explain.

I first met Stuart some 3 years back through a mutual contact at Ogilvy. Stuart had just left the company he had helped to found, Beam.TV and I was finishing off the technical installation on a new in-house post-production facility called Domain. Nicole at Ogilvy suggested that we should meet as she thought our minds would go "fizz" ...

Fast forward to the end of 2008 and the hunt for a new name was on, primary concern of course was a name we could use online too and my genius marketing girlfriend casually mentioned mindsizzler ... well, the serendipity of minds fizzing and minds sizzling was too much to ignore and hence, mindsizzlers was born.

It promises to be a fun journey ...