So today, while house hunting I decide to try something new. Well mostly new, new to me. After the failure of Roadee I wanted to try and redeem myself to Johanna. When we go looking for houses we will offten email ourselves a list of addresses, then when we are driving around we simply go down this list. Now our vehicle of choice, a 1998 Ford Explorer, gets about 14 miles to a gallon of gas. Needless to say we do what we can to conserve gas and minimize driving. That is until we started looking for houses. Its not uncommon for use to get driving around, using the above stated email list, and have the following events take place.
- Drive to house number 1 on our list, we decided we hate the neighborhood and take off for house number 2.
- Arive at house number 2 only to find its more Wiskey Tango, then the first house and decided to jump to house number 3.
- Drvie to house number 3, THAT JUST HAPPENS TO BE 1 BLOCK AWAY FROM HOUSE number 1.
And that there is our problem. We don’t have a way of seeing all of the houses that we want to look at, at once, on one map. Until today. So I did a little noodling and a lot of cut and paste work and was able to make a “my map” in google maps called “Fav Houses”, that has all of our proposed houses on it. It was everything that we were looking for in a map.
I quickly hit the send button. Emailed it to our iPhones and headed out the door to gloat make up for yesterday’s Roadee mishap. I jumped into the running Explorer and whip out my phone and said to Johanna some cocky line about how great I am and them I hit the link in the email from google to show off my new map and got this bullshit.
I was like “What the H?” So with the car still idling in the driveway. Cole fully strapped into his car seat. I went back inside to fix this. Apparently you can’t send “Feature Map’s” to the iPhone. They just give you the city your in and none of the waypoints that you added. But I did find out that you can get the KML data from your “My Map” and manually input that into the google maps app on the iPhone. So it turns out a guy by the name of Andrew de los Reyes build a little web app that does this for you, called MyMapsHelp. You simply right click on the “view in google earth” button in google maps and copy the link then past it into Andrews web app. Then it will generate a new link that you simply email to your iphone and wham. You get this:
Success! I made a bookmark for the link, then added it to my home screen. So now any time I want to see a map that contains all of our favorite houses I just have to hit a bottom on my home screen. I might be losing the war with my tech, but I feel like I’ve won this battle.