GeolocationWhy your browser knows where your towel is

I am ?

Andy Cobley

@andycobley

School of Computing

What we going to do ?

Talk

Demos

Split in three groups

Discussion group

Shallow programming group

Deeper programming group

Presentations and discussion

Geolocation

Allows the browser to know where you are

But you control it !

The browser can use this

Or send it to the server

Programmers

Can use this for good

We don’t how much good yet

Possibly for evil as well, there’s always one

Or how much evil

Browser

You’ll need a nice browser like:

Am I going to talk all day ?

Demo 1

Please play along !

• http://html5demos.com/geo

• Note you can dowload the source code

Demo 2

Who likes Beer ?

• http://beernear.me/

• I borrowed some of this for our demo. Original is at:

http://thecodetrain.co.uk/2010/05/geolocation-and-beer-part-1-finding-the-user/

Demo 3

Gak, it’s all about socializing is it ?

Lets reinvent story telling:

BBC Perceptive media

http://futurebroadcasts.com/

Can we wait for a local reference ?

Discussion group

If you don’t want to try programming:

Form groups and come up with ideas ! What can we do with it

How can we apply it to education

What fun stuff could we do

Beginners programming group

From dropbox download:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ymjs5wzwm3ebbz7/Z-a3mxUljf

Unzip it and run it:

Open geoposition.js

I’ll talk you through

Try different search terms

Try changing the location by hand

You might need a plain text editor like notepad++

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

More advanced

We’ll look at the javascript and pull out more info.

Add extra information

Try altering the formatting with different info

Does it work on a mobile

How accessible is it ?

Further stuff

Really avanced

Try looking at mapping

http://thecodetrain.co.uk/2010/05/geolocation-and-beer-part-1-finding-the-user/

Lets See what we’ve done !