News Here Now
News Here Now is a web app and a related web API (application programming interface) that list single-location restaurants, cafés, bakeries, delis, bookstores, and hardware stores centered at any location worldwide. Chain business locations are ignored so that these non-chain businesses are easier to find.
The businesses are sorted by distance. If the specified location is within a city, some of the nearest businesses are likely to be within walking distance.
These single-location businesses are extracted from the Open Street Map planet database using the open-source BizAt software.
If the OSM information includes a website address (URL) for the business, and if the domain name is not shared with any other business, then the web app supplies a button that directly opens to the business website.
Language-specific versions of the web app are available in English, Français, Deutsch, Español, and Português. Of course the names of businesses are not translated.
The web API returns a JSON response that can be used by another app. Currently this service is available at no cost. The web app will always be free to use.
If the center location is supplied as a GPS coordinate, the center location is changed to the nearest intersection. This "snapping" to the nearest intersection prevents any other software from using the distances to calculate the original latitude and longitude, which would violate the privacy of a user who uses their GPS coordinates.
The intersection data (latitude, longitude, and street names) is also extracted from Open Street Map data using the BizAt software.
The News Here Now web app, which is a single interactive webpage that behaves like an app, also displays the following additional information:
- Nearest yard sales, lost-dog listings, parades, and other location-specific events for which links (URLs) have been supplied using the News Here Now web app
- Nearest police news if an official source of police news has been linked to the News Here Now system
- A link to the map at OpenStreetMap.org for one business location, with an icon showing the business location
- A changing tagline that can be supplied by a business, such as a bakery announcing "Fresh croissants at 10 am"
The web app also allows the location of interest to be specified in these other ways:
- Postal code (US, CA, BR, PT, GB, SE, PL, IN, JP, and AU)
- Typing a city name and comma-separated words of two streets that intersect
- Clicking on the map to move to a nearby location
During the 2019 Canadian Federal Election the News Here Now web app hosted an unofficial poll using ranked choice ballots. Each of the 338 Canadian 'ridings' (districts) had its own ranked-choice ballot for ranking the parliamentary candidates in that riding.