Ajax, Web2.0 and so on are hyped so much at the moment. A prime example is GoogleMaps with its GoogleMaps API. It can be used to build real interactive applications on top of the map display everybody knows.

X-Plane currently lacks proper taxilines for most airports, mainly because there is no proper tool to create them. If you zoom into an airport with GoogleMaps, you will easily see that you can identify more or less every taxiline, parking line and other stuff. So the idea comes up whether one can get these into X-Plane.

Well, I developed a small prototype to learn about the GoogleMaps API. You can place vertices of a polyline directly on the Google map. On “finish” the x/y distance in meters from the first vertex is printed out. Of course there is no reason against creating proper apt.dat format. Not sure if the whole concept is better than proper support in WorldMaker, maybe with GoogleMaps import, but at least it looks interesting I think.