That was fun while it lasted… the author stepped in to explain why the installer source for My Location wasn’t working anymore. From the Hackint0sh thread:
“Bad news, I’m afraid.
We have been requested by Google to remove access from the iPhone app to their web cell id service. The app is therefore suspended for now.”
It’s a shame that they’ve killed off such a useful application. Hopefully this means that an official update is around the corner for the iPhone.
Google released a new beta of their Google Maps for Mobiles application that uses cell phone towers to triangulate the user’s position without needing GPS. The beta is limited to a few cell phone systems right now. I tried it on my Windows Mobile 5 phone and it works great. Naturally, iPhone owners instantly speculated about when Apple and Google would offer this functionality as an update to the iPhone’s Google Maps application.
It seems that www.sanoodi.com has beat Google and Apple to the punch, releasing a “My Location” app for the iPhone that seems to enable Cell Tower based positioning in Google Maps.
You have to be running native applications to get the functionality. Add www.sanoodi.com/iphone to your installer.app sources, and find the app under the Misc category.
I’ve only used both the official Google solution and this new solution from one location. They both seem to be just about equally accurate. I’m impressed that the “hacked” solution can be just as accurate as the official solution so soon.
Thanks to Wayne Sutton for the heads up.
Update: You can read more information at the Hackint0sh forums. This app isn’t using triangulation yet, which explains why it’s a good distance off most of the time. It passes the CellID of the tower you’re connect to and compared that to a database of towers. Then the position of that tower is fed into Google Maps.
Google Maps now has a terrain view, showing images of 3D terrain and, if the city is big enough, buildings. New York’s Map has translucent buildings, and of course the Grand Canyon is a pretty good display of the terrain imagery. When I first read about this new feature at Download Squad I was afraid that they would be doing topographic lines or something, but the soft rendered terrain they are using is clean while still communicating quite a bit of (non-scientific) information.