LocWidget is an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch which lets you add location-aware content to your website without writing a custom iPhone application. You don’t need to learn Objective-C or the Xcode development environment. You don’t need to become an Apple Developer.

You use LocWidget by putting the URL for your web page in the LocWidget settings.  LocWidget settings can also be used to store a user id and password for your site.

When the user runs LocWidget it gets the user’s location and opens the specified URL using the Safari browser.

Appended to the URL is a querystring with key/value pairs which contain the latitude and longitude of the user, the user id and password, and the UDID.  The UDID is an identifier which uniquely identifies that particular iPhone or iPod Touch.

How do I read the location on my website?

You will need to parse the query string with a scripting language.

Here is sample PHP code to read the values supplied by LocWidget into PHP variables.


$Latitude = $_REQUEST['Lat'];
$Longitude = $_REQUEST['Long'];
$Login = $_REQUEST['Login'];
$Password = $_REQUEST['Password'];
$UDID = $_REQUEST['UDID'];


Keep in mind that negative values indicate West Longitude and South Latitude.

Can I get a version of LocWidget customized just for my website?

Yes, we can provide LocWidgets customized with colors and graphics of your choosing, and locked specifically to your website’s url. Visit our Custom LocWidgets page for details.

LocWidget puts the userid and password in the querystring. Is that secure?

No! Putting login information in the querystring of an HTML GET request is not secure, and this approach should not be used for websites that contain sensitive personal or financial information. We have included these fields for convenience, but if you require a secure login you should ignore the User ID and password fields in the LocWidget settings and authenticate your users by more secure methods. If you prefer, we can supply a custom LocWidget for your site that uses the more secure HTTPS protocol.