Google Geocodes

Since I have been on a kick this weekend getting back into the mapping thing, I decided to see what was new in the world of the Google Map API and discovered plenty of new great things. For example, folks have developed reverse geocoders. It's a shame however that the full ISO country names aren't used. Rather, only the country codes are made available via Google's geocode API. I would have much rather had the full country name and the full "AdministrativeAreaName" (i.e. the State or Province in Google Map API parlance) because I could then use this in the AJAX data grid for contributors of specimen records to the Nearctic Spider Database. Similarly, applications like Specify could have taken advantage of this to help users clean or check their data as these are entered.

Nevertheless, I tweaked my old Google Map Geocoder to take advantage of all these advancements. The point of this little gadget is to click a map and get the location and coordinates. In this era of GPS units and iPhones, this may be rather pointless. But it was fun to see what I could do in an hour or so.