Latitude and longitude

[Mark Wieder]

hi-

I had to share this:

I'm converting some of my old OS9 code and came across the need to
specify latitude and longitude. This is easy in OS9 - you bring up the
Map control panel and set a location. Your latitude and longitude are
stored in PRAM and you can retrieve them with a call to the OS.

OSX has dropped the Map control panel and there's no replacement. The
Carbon interface still lets you get at the raw data, though, so
nothing destroys the info that you put in there from OS9. Looking
around for something to replace the Map control panel short of writing
my own I found EarthGlobe v0.9:

http://www.garycmartin.com/osx/

This is a very cool thing. It puts a globe on your desktop and updates
the current position of the daylight line. You can set your location
by command-dragging the globe to rotate it until you're dead center.

Now - I imagine I'm going to have to whip up an external to get at the
location info for my application, and that will take care of OSX for
me - does anyone have an idea how to do this in Windows? I know how to
grab the TimeZone information, but that's as close as I can get. I
don't think there's any sort of location information in the Windows
API. Is there a better way of doing this short of having the user type
in the info and put it into the app preferences?

And *why* did Apple drop something as useful as the Map control panel?

-- 
-Mark
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net