MANO MARKS: Hi.
I'm Mano Marks.
I'm a Developer Advocate on the Google Maps API team.
With me today is Steve Gray.
STEVEN GRAY: Hi there.
MANO MARKS: Steve is a Google Developer Expert.
Steve tell us a little bit about the Google Developer Expert
program.
STEVEN GRAY: Google Developer Experts are really
experts that Google has recognized
as an expert in certain product fields, so for me it's maps.
And we go to conferences.
We talk at events.
We build sample codes and blog posts
about how to use different products.
You can really say that we're the go-to gurus
for the different products.
MANO MARKS: You've built an app using the iOS SDK for Google
Maps, and it's called Synaptic.
Tell us a little bit about it.
STEVEN GRAY: Synaptic pulls down data from the UK Met Office.
MANO MARKS: The Met Office?
Sorry, I don't know what that a--
STEVEN GRAY: The Met Office is a government body here in the UK
that deal with all things weather related,
so forecasts, they build models for what's
happening in the weather on the island
and get the data out as forms of forecast
on TV, and the data out to us developers.
MANO MARKS: Great.
The app we have running here.
Why don't we go ahead and take a little bit of a look
at it, so that people can see what we're talking about?
What am I looking at right now?
STEVEN GRAY: This is the precipitation forecast
for the UK for the next few hours,
and as you see the layers are animating
across the map and bands of rain that are coming across the UK.
The more red the actual color is on the overlay,
the more rain that's in that area.
MANO MARKS: This is the kind of thing
that you would see in TV broadcast at night,
or something like that, and telling you
about what's going on.
STEVEN GRAY: Yeah.
MANO MARKS: How did you do this animation?
STEVEN GRAY: When the app starts, if you just load it,
it pulls down the latest forecast and the latest
observations for the UK.
Then lines up the images as an animation
and then loops random on the map.
So you can see this really nice flow of images across the map.
MANO MARKS: And you're using ground overlays.
You're basically just changing the PNG
that the ground overlay uses?
STEVEN GRAY: Yeah, that's right.
I basically go away and fetch up all the images
and the animation.
And when that's preloaded, then just start the animation off,
and for every loop around the timer
it will insert the ground overlay onto the map,
and it gives us nice illusion of animation.
MANO MARKS: Cool.
What are some of your favorite overlays that you've got here?
STEVEN GRAY: There's two really awesome overlays here.
My favorite is the clouds and the rain together.
And as we fetch the images.
MANO MARKS: It does take a moment to fetch the images,
but once it does it, they're cached,
so they can run through it.
And you can see that it's actually pretty fast.
STEVEN GRAY: You go away and fetch all the images,
so that we don't have this broken cycle of animation.
We've got one infinite loop of the animation of the latest
forecast.
You have here the cloud cover and the rain cover of the UK
forecast for the next few hours.
MANO MARKS: You can barely see the UK on there.
STEVEN GRAY: Yeah, this is natural for the UK.
We're always under clouds.
It's a given.
MANO MARKS: I've noticed that since I've been here.
STEVEN GRAY: We have this layer, which
is really nice, because everything you load this up,
it will load up the forecast for the next 8 to 12 hours.
My other favorite is these observation layers.
You have this infrared observation,
and this is a really nice overlay,
because it's actually the images that come from the weather
satellites that are looking down all the time.
It's the unprocessed images that you don't really
get to see on the weather reports.
And as you see, you have this kind of inverted look
where you can see the clouds cover coming across.
Again, you can't really see the UK
but, when you run the code on different days-- obviously,
it's live data, so we're covered in clouds.
You can see the overlay of the UK,
and it's a really good indicator of whether you've actually
put the ground overly on the map correctly
when it all lines up to the [INAUDIBLE].
MANO MARKS: This is an interesting one.
If you take a look at the rainfall one,
you can actually see that underneath the animated
overlays you actually have, is it a custom map ?
Or is it a tile overlay?
STEVEN GRAY: It's a tile overlay that I've created myself.
When we're putting the ground overlays
of the actual visualization on top of it,
it just allows us to remove the labels for the places,
because we don't really want to see the labels on the map.
MANO MARKS: Right, so just give them
a nice, clean background there.
OK.
Cool.
And again, this is an open source project, so its
up on GitHub.
Here's the link for that.
And if you want to explore the Google Maps SDK for iOS,
here's the link for that.
And specifically, if you want to look at the ground overlay
documentation, you can look here.
All right, thanks for coming in, Steve.
STEVEN GRAY: No problem.
Thanks for having me.
MANO MARKS: Pleasure and thanks for listening.
Bye.