Archive for May, 2009

File Under: Software & Tools
May
22
2009

Google Feels the Need for More Speed With Chrome 2.0

By

Chrome logoWe’ve been playing around with the latest release of Google’s open-source web browser, and we’ve found it to be well worth the upgrade.

Chrome 2.0 adds features like full screen mode, form autofill, the ability to delete specific sites from your most-visited list and a faster JavaScript engine. The JavaScript enhancements are the most important from a competitive perspective because it makes web apps in Chrome run faster, including those made by Google itself.

If you’ve been running Chrome in the beta or developer “channels,” there won’t be too much to see here, as you’ve had access to these new features for a month or so. But if, like most users, you’ve been sticking to stable releases, Chrome 2.0 definitely deserves a place on your desktop.

The most noticeable change from earlier releases is the speed boost. Thanks to an update to Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, Google claims that Chrome 2.0 loads pages about 30 percent faster. While those with faster hardware may not notice it in general use, JavaScript-heavy pages like Google’s Gmail, Docs and other web apps, are a bit snappier. These are the same applications upon which Google is betting a large part of not only its future, but the future of the web. By making its own webapps run more efficiently to the point where they closely rival the performance of their desktop counterparts, Google is hoping more users will switch to the hosted versions.Also noteworthy are the browser’s new tab controls, which allow you to delete select sites from the most-visited list that appears when you open a new tab in Chrome — you wouldn’t want anyone to know you’ve been frequenting those gamer dating sites again now, would you?

While Chrome 2.0 is a worthwhile upgrade, it’s regrettable that one of our favorite features from the most recent developer beta — the ability to drag tabs and compare two tabs side by side — did not make the cut. Also missing from the new Chrome 2.0 release is the experimental extensions support.

As always, if you’re already using Chrome, you’ll be prompted to upgrade in the near future. If you’d like to take Chrome for a spin, head to the download page (sorry, still no native Mac or Linux versions, but you can try the Chromium releases). And if you’d like to test the betas or developer releases, be sure to grab a copy of the channel switcher app as well.

See Also:

File Under: Programming, Visual Design
May
21
2009

Where 2.0: Drawing the Shape of the Flickr-verse

By

SAN JOSE, California — Ever since Flickr started accepting and storing geodata attached to its users’ photos, the service has amassed over 100 million geotagged photos from all over the world.

That’s a whole lot of points on a map. And since most of those 100-million-plus photos have at least one place name attached to them, that’s a lot of human-tagged data in the form of city names, neighborhood names and street names, among other random, disparate tags.

For a while now, Flickr has been using these correlated data sets to draw “alpha shapes,” shapes on a map whose outlines are defined only by the tags people have associated with photos taken in that place. For example, at the top of this post, you can see Flickr’s alpha shape for Vietnam. This shape was made by taking all the photos Flickr users have tagged “Vietnam” and reverse-geocoding them. Flickr takes each place-name-tagged photo and associates a series of six numerical Where On Earth (WOE) IDs with it, one for each level of granularity — neighborhood, city, county, region, country and continent. Some photos only have one or two WOEIDs, some have all six. Once those WOEIDs are assigned, the photo can be plotted on a map. Draw an outline around that cluster of points on your map, and you’ve got an alpha shape. The process is described in greater detail on Flickr’s developer blog.

The alpha shapes are imperfect — the borders are sloppy and a little raw, but that’s the way Flickr likes it.

“Alpha shapes allow us to define a place not as it exists in reality, but as people see it,” says Flickr’s Aaron Cope, who presented a talk on alpha shapes at the Where 2.0 Conference taking place here this week.

“They also serve as examples of the old saying, ‘Neighborhoods are always under dispute,’” he says.

The software that makes this possible is an open-source app called Clustr, which was written by geo-guru Schuyler Erle. Clustr is able to associate WOEIDs with place-tagged photos and plot them.

Starting Thursday, Flickr is also making all of its alpha shapes available as a free download (large GZip’d XML file).

Image: Aaron Cope (Straup)/Flickr

Other Where 2.0 Coverage:

File Under: Events, Multimedia
May
21
2009

Where 2.0: Video Tracks a Year of Edits on OpenStreetMap

By

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

This video animates an entire year’s worth of edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project. OSM is a public and open database of maps encompassing the whole world — think of it as an open, free version of Google Earth.

Edits are made, wiki-style, by contributors around the globe. Each white flash in this video represents a new edit being made to the database during 2008.

From the OSM site:

Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data.

There are some astonishing moments, like when a massive data dump fills in almost the entirety of India, or when a huge blotches of white suddenly appear in Eastern Europe and in North America.

The animation was created by Itoworld, and is licensed under the Creative Commons.

Other Where 2.0 Coverage:

File Under: Multimedia, Visual Design
May
21
2009

Historical Map Mashups Turn Cities Into Glass Onions of Time

By

The image above looks like a bit of a mess, but that’s only because it’s two maps of lower Manhattan layered on top of one another — an 1891 street map overlaid by a 2006 map of the NYC Subway system.

The screenshot is taken from Hypercities, a MacArthur-funded project to help create these kinds of historical analysis tools. Currently, the site has 39 maps of New York City made between 1766 and 2009, all of which have been aligned using open-source software tools so their transparencies can be adjusted. You can juxtapose any number of maps you’d like — ranging from a map of government buildings made around the time of Washington’s inauguration to 1990s demographic maps marking ethnicity and income — effectively letting you peel New York City like a giant onion, exposing layers of history as you go.

Old maps are dug up and scanned, then specific points are plotted against known lat-long data from OpenStreetMap and other open geodatabases. The older maps are then “rubber sheeted,” or stretched to be match modern geo-data. Lastly, the maps are tiled and fed into a database that make this sort of front-end mashup possible.

Hypercities also has time-layered views of Los Angeles, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Cairo, a historical site in Peru and a few other world cities.

Hypercities is just one such project. Cartifact is also doing something similar. Both were part of a presentation Thursday at the Where 2.0 Conference by Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, the small firm responsible for Digg’s data visualizations and the infamous Oakland Crimespotting map mashup.

Also be sure to check out Migurski’s own project called Old Oakland. He overlaid historical maps of Oakland using a scanner, Photoshop, and getlatlon.com, a site created by Simon Willison that gives you latitude and longitude coordinates for any point on a map anywhere in the world.

Other Where 2.0 Coverage:

File Under: Software & Tools
May
21
2009

Firefox Add-ons Blast Off With ‘JetPack’

By

Browser add-ons are unquestionably a huge part of Firefox’s success. Unfortunately, building add-ons isn’t for everyone, but that’s something Mozilla is hoping to change with a new Labs project named JetPack.

JetPack is a brand new experimental way of extending Firefox. Because it uses simple tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, anyone who can build a website should be able to create something with JetPack.

Using JetPack is also dead simple for end users — there’s no need to restart Firefox when installing JetPack add-ons, and JetPack add-ons will be compatible across multiple versions of Firefox. Because the tools JetPack offers — namely an API — are backed into Firefox, any browser updates won’t affect the JetPack add-ons.

So how does JetPack work? At its most basic level JetPack offers an API that can be used to send HTML and JavaScript commands to the browser. Much of the UI is handled behind the scenes, so creating a JetPack add-on requires very little code, and the code it does require is simple.

Just because the commands are simple doesn’t mean JetPack can’t be powerful. In fact, Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, has created a very nice video that walks you through the steps of creating a JetPack add-on that duplicates much of functionality found in the Ad Block Plus add-on with just a dozen lines of code.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack – Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

For the initial release, the Jetpack APIs allow you to interact with Firefox widgets like statusbars, tabs, content-scripts and animations. There’s also built-in support for using the jQuery JavaScript library.

The other interesting element of JetPack is its ability to interact with other web services and APIs. For example, your JetPack app could pass queries to the Twitter API to return real-time results for a specific query, or perhaps pull in and do something with recent Flickr images.

In short, JetPack takes much of the power of the Firefox add-on system and mixes it together with the web, all without requiring you to learn a new programming language.

What’s not to love? At the moment, it’s a very early release, so the APIs may well change significantly before the final release. The release announcement also cautions that the Jetpack API “does not include a fully formed security model… it is being released for testing, development, and feedback.”

With that in mind, if you’d like to play around with JetPack, head over to the new JetPack site at Mozilla Labs to download and install JetPack. There’s also nice looking tutorial to help you get started building your first JetPack add-on.

See Also:

« OLDER POSTS