CF Sunstroke

After many years of playing around with Google Maps and the Google Maps API, I've finally built a marker admin tool that I'm fairly happy with. The new Google Maps v3 JavaScript API is light years ahead of the previous version and much more like the Action Script one. Using the cleaner simple tools and APIs they opened up I was able to put this rough demo together in less than 30 minutes. In short, this is the beginnings of the prototype for a set of tools to create and manage marker points for Google Maps.

The tool is pretty basic right now, you can view all of the markers that have been added so far (the map defaults to the Phoenix area) you can add a new marker by either entering an address / city / zip code / well known landmark or by right clicking anywhere on the map and the application will automatically go out and reverse geo-code the Lat/Lng to create an address. Once you have a marker on the map, you can fine tune it's location by dragging it, then you can add some notes about the marker and save it to the database. The notes and the address will show up on the front end demo map in the info window.

Here is a short list of the features I plan to add to the next revision:

1. A tool to manage previously saved maker points
2. User selectable marker icons
   1. At the very least a way to choose what color marker icon to use
   2. Someday, the ability to select from a user controlled library of custom marker icons, such as company logos. Useful for things like Hotel Brands, etc...
3. The ability to create multiple maps and assign markers to them independently
4. A better front end map the pulls it's marker data in a cleaner way. Using CF to hardcode the array of markers just seems wrong, I know I can get them in an XML format using jQuery...
5. The ability to selectively filter groups of markers out of the display on the front end based on criteria entered in on the backend. Imagine this was used for a real estate app and you only wanted houses with 3 bedrooms...
6. A decent skin for the UI...

Here is the demo, comments are appreciated.