A quick app made for a norwegian friend visiting Rome
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Quick and convenient. I’d remove the superfluous “Take Me There” button since the map already provides that function.
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@Les_Henderson . What do you mean the map already provides that function?
I’m getting some not in Italy map pins (Australia, Macedonia?). Interestingly though when you click “Take me there” Google maps does figure it out. Per chance do you already have Lat and Long for that button? If so use those for your map points as well. I haven’t used the map component all that much but I have read that if you want the best accuracy you should use lat and long. Since you don’t have a bunch of points of interest you could just look them up manually and plug them in. Do a search on getting Lat and Long in bulk, there are some free tools as well.
When I built the app, the pins pointed to the right location, I don’t know what happened in the meanwhile anyway, from now on, I’ll use coordinates for the pins.
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@Les_Henderson the map component doesn’t provide any navigation ability. That’s what the “Take Me There” button is for. That way you can open Google Maps for example and get directions for navigating, instead of just looking at you location on a map in relation to the POI.
and in reply to @George_B
Thanks Jeff for clearing up my lack of knowledge regarding the navigation features of the “Take me there” button. I don’t recall seeing any mention of it in the docs so I’m thrilled to learn something new.
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Just remember, if you are looking at the full url of any pin, to take the last coordinates and not the first ones you see, which are those used to propagate the general map area.
You will also need to convert the code between the latitude and longitude to a space and comma.
For example, say that the very last bit of some random pins’ url is this
40.4743545!4d-78.0520082
You need to change that !4d to ", " as in 40.4743545, -78.0520082 and you are good to go.
Just so others are not confused, it’s not a “Take me there” button per se. It’s just a normal Button component titled “Take me there” by the developer which is connected to a URL in a cell and the action is set to “Open as link”. It is not specific to maps or anything like that. That is why you would not find it in the documentation.
So I may have actually been right when I said that clicking and opening the map was the same as the user titled button?
Are you saying that you were able to click on this apps map and it opened it in a browser with all the points shown? It doesn’t work that way for me on my PC or Android device.
I think you are confused about the difference between a map layout and an map component. Map layouts allow multiple points on the map and you can’t click on the map and open it. A map component, which is connected to a single address, can be clicked and opened in a browser.
I found the coord using OpenStreetMap, in my experience works better with mapbox.
I am easily confused, hence this long discussion.
Thank you for pointing out a distinction I had no idea existed. I shall experiment further.
Edit: I now see that opening a map doesn’t give me directions. In my national app it didn’t make any difference but for city tours I can see how it would.
Obviously forget what I said initially.
Now I’m wondering why clicking on a map brings up a different Google feature than a button url.
Even though @George_B notes layout and components are different, I’m sure I’ll forget the difference and get my app viewers lost in some distant forest, or summon them off a cliff.
Feature request: App integration with smart car navigation.