So it seems I have to write this post again because my server crashed.. leaving everything alone but my sql databases… Oh well, could be a lot worst.

So after my post yesterday about how I update my location on my site I got a reply from @andre_vans that told me about a project called “PlayNice”. The GIThub source is at http://github.com/natfriedman/playnice and the the creator of it has a blog post about it at http://nat.org/blog/2009/08/playnice-google-apple/.

Now I mentioned in my post yesterday that I wanted to be able to use some sort of push notification on the iPhone so that my site could ask for an update and the phone would comply. This would require a custom app on the iPhone to automatically execute something when it has a push notification. Now I’m not even sure if that is possible at this stage as that would almost be like the app is running in the background, which apple does not allow yet. However, Apple has such a service built into the phone that allows anyone with a MobileMe account linked to their iPhone to get the location of the device.

So with that PlayNice will basically log in as you on your MobileMe account and launch the locate phone feature. Now the neat thing about this is that it also updates to your Google Latitude account. This make’s it pretty much perfect for what I want to do. With the source code freely available and easy to understand it was a breeze adding 3 lines of code to update my map backend whenever the PlayNice script is ran. If you wan’t to do the same with most of the code from my post yesterday then follow me past the break. Otherwise, ignore me.
(continue reading…)