A record of doing a new thing every day in 2011
Adding in the gratuitous “Where Am I?” feature into my Bedside Clock phone app is becoming ridiculously time consuming.
After my last attempt to do this worked in a non-optimal way, I decided to try out SimpleGeo as a way of turning locations into place names. I’d heard good things about them - admittedly mainly from news sites like TechCrunch - and they seemed a good solution.
After I’d wrestled with installing all the right Python libraries I needed to get their example code working, I couldn’t get any data from them. For a long time I thought it was somehow related to my poor connectivity on the train, but turns out they just don’t have much data in the UK. If they do, it didn’t get returned for me. :-( I guess good coverage in Silicon Valley is the only requirement for a “good” geo-location service.
Anyway before I got home I found that Yahoo! PlaceFinder seems to have much better worldwide coverage and looks really good - so I’m going to give that a go next.
