The idea here is very simple. iPhones (and other cool new phones) come with GPS, satellite imagery, and Internet access. Since theme parks don't have streets and addresses for the attractions, I thought it would be useful to start generating lists of the GPS coordinates of theme park attractions. Since I can't spend my time flying around the country mapping out parks, I'm hoping visitors to this site will contribute, Wikipedia-style, to the listings. It's easy to do:
When you're at a notable place--like an attraction entrance--launch Google Maps. Wait for it to locate you. (1) Tap the "options" button in the bottom right corner. (2)
When the page "curls up", choose "drop pin."
If you've already dropped a pin, the label will say "replace pin."
Once it has your location, press the ">" icon...
... and once you're there, tap "share location"...
and then email me the coordinates.
(I recommend you add me to your address book for the day to make addressing messages easier.) The first time you send a message, please specify the park and location. After that, abbreviations are OK--like in this example for "Sea World entrance." (I'll group incoming messages by sender.) If you want, you can also say hi, add a description of the attraction, include a picture, whatever. Eventually I'd like to combine this with a big database of park information but I'm sure there are tons of sites online with all that information so I'll probably just partner with one to get that info. (If you have a favorite park site--or run one!--please let me know.)
And that's pretty much it. There is one small down side to all this. Unfortunately, the iPhone software is--at the moment--a little limited in its accuracy when it comes to reading coordinates and displaying markers. For example, I went to Epcot in Orlando, Florida, and marked my spot near Spaceship Earth. If I look at the location in Google Maps at home, it's perfect, but if I look at the location on my phone, it's a little off. Like, halfway around the thing. Hopefully that will be fixed in a future release. For now, that limits the usefulness a bit--it's good for "what's the best way to get to Tomorrowland?" but that's about it. It's not quite good enough to distinguish one attraction from another that's close by. Also, since it can only show one location at a time, it can't do things like show you where all the bathrooms or restaurants are. Paper park maps are still good for many things. :-) But its usefulness will only improve as the software gets more and more capable. Oh, and feel free to look at the source for the pages and use the lists of coordinates in your own way. If anyone uses this data for anything, I'd love to hear about it! And if someone knows of a similar project that already exists, let me know--I couldn't find one but if there's already one there's no reason to duplicate the effort!
For now the only map I have is this partial map for Epcot in Orlando, but hopefully more maps will be added soon!