Thursday, June 7, 2012

Making a location badge using OsmAnd and the MapQuest Open static map API

I'm about to embark on my second Biking Across Kansas tour. When I did it last year, I used Google Latitude to create a little "My Location" badge which I put here on my blog to let people track me across the state. The Google one looks like this:



However at some point during the last year I noticed that OsmAnd added a feature that allows it to periodically ping a web service of your choosing with the current location of the phone. This allows me to build my own location publishing service.

I did a little searching for how other people have used this feature in OsmAnd and found a few people talking about feeding the data into a Google map display. The example in the OsmAnd wiki posts the location to a Google doc which then somehow magically updates a Google map display. No offense to Google but I'd rather use OSM based products. Fortunately the good people over at MapQuest Open provide a service that suits this situation: The static map API.