Tech Mashup Idea: Live Street View for Google Maps

Cell phone cameras are getting much more impressive.  I just saw an 8 megapixel HD camera on an Android  phone.  Neat.  Also about time.  Android also has lots of great apps too (I really need to dig into Java programming a bit more).  After all, it's free to develop apps (eclipse.org, android.com, etc.) for it.  A friend (@alanlupsha) and I were swapping app ideas when it finally hit me: live street view feeds.

Given that phones have:

• high quality cameras to capture photos and video
• the ability to record a lat/long position, and a bearing & angle (via compass app/tilt/acceleratometers)
• the ability to send data and communicate with other devices/computers

then this app can:

• automatically geotag photos with a lat/long, direction, and angle OR
  automatically geotag frames of a video with locations along a recorded along a path (also see RoboGEO software)
• upload geotagged media to a server when you return to your home wifi connection, or any other wifi hotspot (@alanlupsha)
• server geocodes the images (with minimal effort now) and updates an internet mapping application view that can be shared individually as a single view (see Google's Street View @ the 2010 Olympic ski runs)

Browser Spellchecking: Text areas and text boxes

I love Mozilla's dictionary extension/add-on, though I noticed that it only works on text areas (blog entries, facebook comment boxes, etc.) as opposed to other one-line text boxes (blog titles, "Enter your name" type fields).  It turns out that this is a setting that can be changed so all text input boxes can be checked for spelling.  Also, it's not difficult to change either:

Using Mozilla:

• type about:config into the URL address bar and hit Enter
• take note of the resulting message, warning users to be careful with any changes and click the, "I'll be careful, I promise!" button to bring up a list of all of the preferences available in the browser
• type layout.spellcheckDefault into the filter and double click on the matching result to change the setting from 1 to 2
• 0 = Disable Spellchecker
• 1 = Enable Spellchecker for multi-line controls (default)
• 2 = Enable Spellchecker for multi- and single-line controls
• Click OK to save the parameter

That's it!  Change it back to 1 if you don't like it, though I find it to be pretty useful.