Last week, I started work on a location-based iPhone app that will revolutionize how people discover cities. A major pain point was simulating “incremental” location changes, i.e. simulating movement.

So I hacked together an AppleScript app that allows you to “navigate” to the North, South-West, or South-East. It’s available on GitHub.

Usage —— This is how it looks:

Instructions

1. Open script in AppleScript Editor, save as Application.
2. Make the Application invokable through a keyboard shortcut, e.g. ⇧⌘L^L ¹.
3. (For demo purposes:) In iOS Simulator launch Maps app.
4. Hit ⇧⌘L^L and choose a direction, and see the blue location indicator move by about 600 meters.

Limitations

• I am by no means proficient in AppleScript, and rather happy I got it to work at all! So don’t expect nice code on this one.
• Only N, SW, and SE bearings possible. This is because dialogs in AppleScript have a maximum of three buttons. (These three bearings allow moving around the map through linear combinations.)
• If you don’t like what you see, but like the idea – hey, it’s open-source, so fork away, and I’ll be glad to merge your pull requests.

Get it from the GitHub repository.

Updates