Randal has been playing around with Aperture to organize his photos on his MacBook then upload them to Flickr. It has a nifty feature to geotag images based on the current view in Google Earth.

I figured that must be using AppleScript, so I tried creating a Mac::Glue glue for it:

% sudo gluemac /Applications/Google\ Earth.app
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That worked. The glue isn't that interesting. I can get the data for the current view, which is what Aperture does:

my $gEarth = Mac::Glue->new('Google_Earth');

my $reco = $gEarth->getviewinfo;
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That gives me a hash:

        {
          'azimuth' => '1.19852752792094e-14',
          'longitude' => '-96.4999988896226',
          'distance' => '25484000',
          'latitude' => '40.4999984526947',
          'tilt' => '-1.26725225589562e-15'
        }
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I want to set the view though. But what to set it too? How about flying through all of the Perl Mongers locations? I can get those from the Perl Mongers XML file. Once I extract the latitude and longitude I pass it back to setviewinfo. If I wanted to get really fancy I could then use savescreenshot to save the view.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::Simple;
use Mac::Glue;

print "Downloading Perl Mongers XML file...";
my $data = get( 'http://www.pm.org/groups/perl_mongers.xml' );
$data ? ( print "done\n" ) : ( die "Could not get file!" );

# See Mac::Glue for details on creating the glue, probably:
#     gluemac /Applications/Google\ Earth.app
print "Starting Google Earth...";
my $gEarth = Mac::Glue->new( 'Google_Earth' );
$gEarth ? ( print "done\n" ) : ( die "Could not start Google Earth!" )
+;


while( $data =~ m|<group.*?>(.*?)</group>|gs )
    {
    # I could use an XML parser, but it's too easy to do  it myself
    my( $name, $long, $lat ) = $1 =~ m|
        <name>(.*?)</name>
            .*?
        <longitude>(.*?)</longitude>
            .*?
        <latitude>(.*?)</latitude>
        |xs;
        
    print "Flying to $name\n";
    
    $gEarth->setviewinfo(
        {
        'azimuth'   => '0',
        'longitude' => $long,
        'distance'  => '4000',
        'latitude'  => $lat,
        'tilt'      => '0'
        }
        );

    sleep 15;
    }
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You might have to make that sleep a little longer if you have a slower network connection, and maybe you want to loop around the setviewinfo to start farther up (that number is in meters) and zoom in.

Have fun :)