This morning London Datastore announced that TFL had lifted all restrictions on commercial reuse of its data (via @retomeier). I love the idea of building a London transport application for Android so I started playing around with the station data which lead me to investigate how Keyhole Markup Language functions on the Android platform.

Launching the native Maps application from within a bespoke application with some KML data from the internet is really easy.

 
public class LoadActivity extends Activity {
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        Uri uri = Uri.parse("geo:0,0?q=http://paxmodept.com/files/office.kml");
        Intent mapIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, uri);
        startActivity(mapIntent);        
    }
}

Best of all is that you can do the same thing by simply clicking on a KML file in the Android browser. You can try it from your Android device here. I can imagine plenty of use cases for this including store locations and favourite places.