Second Shootr – The Digital Shoot Assistant For Modern Photographers

Google Maps

Posted on January 20, 2010

Second Shootr - Maps functionality updated in version 1.1We've had a few queries surrounding the address lookup within Second Shootr, so I thought I'd take a moment to explain how it currently works and what we're doing in the future.

The agreement between Google and Apple isn't particularly useful to us developers. Google allows developers to display the maps, but to only perform address searches using latitude and longitude. Google won't allow developers to find an address on a map by entering an address (as you do in Second Shootr).

To get around this, we use a third party company to convert an address into a latitude and longitude so that Google can display a map with a pin on it in the correct place. Unfortunately, its hard to find a third party company who's good for worldwide addresses. This meant that our UK and USA users in particular weren't getting good results when using Second Shootr's lookup feature.

In version 1.1 of Second Shootr, we will be ditching our current third party and we'll instead be using an address lookup service that's running on our own websevers. This gives us greater control over how addresses are looked up and should result in much less errors and a more accurate Second Shootr!

We're still testing 1.1 at the moment, but evidence seems to lean towards this service being much more reliable, and faster too.

Long story short:

Map lookups won't suck in 1.1. Yay!

About Tim

Tim Collins has written 25 posts in this blog.

Tim is a photographer and owner of Plinkk photography. He designed Second Shootr.