If you have been reading along in this series I’m doing on inter application communications from FileMaker Go, you know that this stuff is far from rocket science. I would love it if readers contribute their ideas and knowledge on communicating with other interesting iOS apps. Here’s part 3. I am already in love with the capacity to deploy Google Earth in my Knowledger database.
Example: my People table in Knowledger mostly contains people I want to know more about like famous people in history and current luminaries of interest. Today I added Marko Ahtisaari who has been the lead designer at Nokia.
Google Earth
When I added Marko, I also entered his birthplace which happens to be one of the design capitals of the world: Helsinki, Finland. It was obvious that there should be a way to quickly get more information about Helsinki.
I just recently saw this week that the Google Earth app on iPad and iPhone shows Wikipedia entries for whatever place it is showing. That did it. I needed to add Google Earth as an app resource to Filemaker Go. I researched URL Schemes for Google Earth on iOS and I found documentation that said all you can do is open the app, you can’t send it parameters to tell it what to search for. Not impressive but I created a script that copies the birthplace to the clipboard and then opens the Google Earth app with Open URL:
That means I can paste in the birthplace once I am in Google Earth and can avoid typing.
Google Maps
But Google Maps, takes search parameters in its URL Scheme and it happens to have a link to Google Earth in its menu on iPad and iPhone. So this is a better option for my needs I think.
A single Open URL button step gets you there without the copy paste:
“comgooglemaps://google.com/?q=” & People::Birthplace
There you have it.