Resources
- Google Maps API Repo (Python)
- WayPoints Documentation
- Google Maps API Tutorial (Python)
- Python Client Documentation
- Places API Python Wrapper
This week I just wanted to play around with google maps. Once again I found that there is a FLASK extension to do this, but instead I just decided to mess around and find some resources for using just command line python. I found that the maps API is more like 6 APIs you have to turn on, which seems weird, but hey! Internet!
Anyways, I found a few good resources, and just put together a little program that looks for nearby places and sets them as waypoints. In this way you could potentially always route someone through every pizza joint in town before getting to their destination. Which I wouldn’t mind, because who doesn’t like pizza? I’m pretty sure within a year someone will make an app called Pizza Quest that does just this (hmmm…).
The places api is pretty big too. It spits out reviews, images, locations, hours, lat/long, different kinds of address formatting. Its impressive how much is packed in there.
Other neat things I found, did you know there is a google maps longest route challenge? It takes place every year!
Components: Just Python
Things I experimented With: APIs, aggregation, parsing
Things I learned: It takes a lot of APIs going to run google maps.
Future Iterations: Plugging this into a GPS device would be pretty fun.