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EveryBlock Source Code Release Offers Glimpse of the Magic Behind the Curtain

By Scott Gilbertson July 2nd, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

EveryBlock, the local news aggregator that touts itself as a “news feed for your block,” has followed through on its much-anticipated source code release.

The local news site was founded two years ago by Adrian Holovaty, who is also one of the creators of the Django web development framework, which powers EveryBlock. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has operated on a grant from the Knight Foundation. The grant enabled EveryBlock to remain free of the pressures of venture capital funding and focus on experimenting with “micro local” news. The result of those experiments is a whole new way of looking at local news. We’re especially fond of the awesome EveryBlock iPhone app.

One of the stipulations in the Knight grant was that EveryBlock release its source code so that other sites can build on EveryBlock’s foundation.

For developers working with Django — a Python-based web framework — the new code provides a wealth of Django and geographic tools. It’s particularly interesting since much of it was written by Holovaty himself, one of the stars of Django development.

Of course, just because the code is not available to the public doesn’t mean you can drag-and-drop some files to your web server and create your own EveryBlock clone.

It would be nice if you could but, while the source code is a good starting point, much of EveryBlock’s success has nothing to do with its impressive source code. EveryBlock’s real success stems from the team’s ability to work with government officials to get access to the raw data and then organize it geographically.

If you’ve followed the EveryBlock blog at all, you’ll know that, sadly, local governments aren’t exactly forthcoming with their data. In fact, some seem downright hostile to the idea of sharing “their” data. The fact EveryBlock has been able to get access to data like building permits, crime stats and everything else on the site, is more a testimony to the group’s skills as bureaucratic negotiators than any Python tricks hidden up its sleeves.Still, having had a look at the EveryBlock source code, we can assure you there are indeed some very cool Python tricks in EveryBlock’s code — especially when it comes to working with geographic database extensions like GIS — and it will no doubt prove a gold mine for the Django community.

So what happens to EveryBlock.com, now that the grant money is gone? Holovaty writes on the EveryBlock blog that the site plans to continue as a private company, and he promises that the team still has some cool tricks to show off. “We have some exciting ideas planned around revolutionizing the whole EveryBlock experience,” writes Holovaty, “we’re only getting started.”

If you’d like to see what sort of magic has been powering EveryBlock for the last two years, head on over to the new source code page and download the code. The code is broken down into several categories with tools ranging from the GIS tools to the data-acquisition modules and scripts. All of the code is available under the GPL 3.0.

One thing to keep in mind if you’re planning to develop some sort of EveryBlock site: The design and the name are not part of the release. In other words, your project can be inspired by EveryBlock, but don’t rip it off.

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Adobe’s New Flash Tools Ease the Pain for Both Designers and Coders

By Scott Gilbertson June 1st, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming, Software & Tools

Adobe has released two new tools for Flash developers and updated its popular framework for building sites with Flash.

The company has announced the beta release of its Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly known Flex Builder), along with a new authoring tool, Flash Catalyst. The open-source Flex framework has also been updated. All three pieces of software were made available for download early Monday through Adobe Labs.

The beta releases of Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst are both free downloads now. Adobe plans on collecting feedback from the Flash community before releasing the products commercially later this year. Flex Builder 3 is currently priced at $250 for the standard version and $700 for the pro version, and Flash Builder 4, as it will be re-named, is expected to be priced somewhere in that ballpark when it’s released in the late summer of 2009. Pricing and availability information for Flash Catalyst has not been determined, but Adobe says it plans to keep Flash Catalyst in beta a little longer than Flash Builder.

Both tools put a great deal of emphasis on making it easier for visual designers and coders to collaborate on projects.

Flash Catalyst goes a long way toward improving the depth of that collaboration by offering designers a way to transform artwork created in Photoshop or Illustrator into user interface elements. Using Catalyst, the designer can build a working prototype of a design, complete with scrollbars, buttons and animations. That way, when the designer hands off a visual design to the Flash developer, the major elements are already rendered as moving pieces in the design, and the developer doesn’t have to interpret what the designer wants by referring to documentation or, more often, by asking the designer to describe the intended behaviors.

Flash Catalyst can publish finished Flash files (SWF) and offers round-trip editing using other apps in the Adobe Creative Suite. So, if the visual design of a button changes, the related images inside the Flash file are automatically updated.

For developers, the new Flash Builder 4 offers several new data-centric tools with a simple drag-and-drop approach for creating interactive charts, graphs, and data grids.

The final part of Adobe’s new release is an update for the open-source Flex framework which offers a simplified, component-based way to develop for Adobe’s Flash Platform.

Interestingly, Adobe’s updates to its Flash authoring tools come on the heels of last week’s Google’s I/O conference, where the search and services giant showed off the power of HTML 5 and how nearly everything Flash excels at — video, audio, complex interfaces — can be created using pure HTML. While we don’t expect Flash to disappear any time soon, clearly alternatives are starting to gain momentum. And support for HTML5 in the major browsers is still somewhat lacking, so these Flash tools give designers the opportunity to create rich, immersive interfaces now, without worrying as much about cross-browser compatibility.

In the mean time, for those working with Flash on a daily basis, the latest Flash Builder 4 and other Flash workflow enhancements should be welcome news.

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Google Maps V3 Offers Easier, Faster API

By Scott Gilbertson May 28th, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

Google has announced the next major version of its Maps API. While Google has added features to the API at a pretty regular pace, the Maps API hasn’t seen a major rewrite in almost three years.

The new Google Maps API v3 promises a simpler, faster set of tools and has been optimized for the small screen with the iPhone’s Mobile Safari and Google Chrome making the list of supported browsers. Your mashups should also work on Android’s browser with only a few small issues.

Although version 3 is currently only in the testing phase, there are several big changes that should make it an appealing upgrade for developers.

  1. You no longer need an API key — If you’ve ever tried cutting and pasting code from Google Maps tutorials, only to get API key errors, your pain is gone. Cut and paste with abandon.
  2. Smaller JavaScript download — The API has been refactored with an emphasis on using MVC architecture. The result is a smaller JavaScript file, making for significantly faster page loads.
  3. The Default UI is enabled automatically — There’s no need to add zooming or other controls to your map under the new API. It’s a small change, but it saves a few lines of code and makes developers’ lives easier. Of course, if you’ve been using your own, custom UI controls you can still do so.
  4. Chrome and Mobile Safari have been added to the list of supported browsers. While your mashups should work on Android-based phones with the most recent update, Google does caution that there may be some issues during this Labs testing phase.

For a complete rundown on what’s new and changed in Google Maps API v3 check out the reference page on Google Labs and the documentation. There’s also a new Google Group for gathering developer feedback on v3.

While Google is calling the new API “experimental,” I went ahead and ran some of the demo code in the browser. I can safely say that if you don’t mind the beta status, the speed improvements alone are well worth any risk of reliability.

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Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5

By Michael Calore May 27th, 2009 Categories: Events, Programming

SAN FRANCISCO, California — This morning was HTML 5’s big coming-out party.

At Google I/O, the company’s developer conference taking place at the Moscone Center here this week, Google Vice President of engineering Vic Gundotra centered the majority of his keynote presentation around what the company is doing to promote the next version of HTML, the mark-up language upon which the bulk of the web is built.

HTML 5 is still nascent technology. It’s only in the draft specification stage, mired in committee at the W3C, the web’s governing body. But HTML 5 is already being implemented in the wild, both as experimental demos and as the driving technology behind the latest wave of web applications.

“HTML 5 offers us a chance to do things differently,” says Gundotra. He also noted that in the last decade, we’ve seen close to a 100X improvement in JavaScript parsing across the major browsers that helps make the latest apps run faster.

To illustrate his point, Gundotra showed several breakthrough HTML 5 demos during his keynote. You can view all of the demos here.

We saw a video playing in a mocked-up version of a YouTube page without using Flash. All of the video playback was handled using the HTML 5 video tag.

“The problem with video right now is that there’s too much outside of your control,” Gundotra says. “HTML 5 gives you a <video> tag that’s as simple to use as the <image> tag.”

We also saw a motion-tracking video app rendered in JavaScript, complete with full-motion HTML video playback. A woman walked across the camera’s field of view while a JavaScript app, running in the browser, tracked her movement and dynamically drew bounding boxes around the different parts of her body as she paced back and forth. Normally, this intense of an app would cause the browser to lock up and crash (or throw a spinning beach ball). But thanks to HTML 5’s “web workers” background processing capabilities, the browser barely stuttered while the app was running. The crowd of 4,000 attendees applauded wildly at this.

We saw a Doom-style first-person shooter game rendered entirely using JavaScript and HTML 5’s canvas vector graphics engine. Gundotra also showed off a canvas-powered analytics tool with 2D graphs you can zoom in on and resize on the fly, and a 3D animated demo of a beach scene, complete with crashing waves, flickering torches and palm trees blowing in the breeze, all rendered in JavaScript and HTML 5.

Gundotra’s demos concentrated on the “five components of HTML 5 Google is most excited about”: canvas, video, web workers, geolocation, app cache and database access.

The latest versions of the mobile Android browser and the soon-to-be-released Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone will both support some HTML 5 elements, so of course there were some mobile demos at the I/O keynote, as well. The team showed a Gmail user checking his e-mail in the browser while disconnected from the internet (utilizing HTML 5’s support for offline data access) and an iPhone user updating his location in Google Latitude running in the browser (the new iPhone software, due in June, supports geolocation via HTML 5).

It’s exciting to see Google betting the bank on HTML 5, but not entirely surprising. The company is in the web app business, so any technology that makes web apps faster, better and more useful is going to be supported — even more so if that technology is based on open standards and doesn’t require plug-ins or proprietary code like Flash and Silverlight.

Wednesday’s keynote wasn’t all cheerleading. Several digs were aimed at Microsoft for failing to support much of HTML 5 in the latest version of Internet Explorer. IE8 does have experimental geolocation support, but no support for HTML 5 video playback, canvas, or web workers.

Microsoft is quick to argue that it isn’t prudent to build support for untested technologies into its browser code, which is used by the majority of people on the web. Probably closer to the truth: Microsoft has its own playback technology in Silverlight and isn’t interested in sinking its own ship.

Microsoft has pledged support for HTML 5, but warns that it’s still a long way off. But as Gundotra’s keynote illustrates, HTML 5 is just about all grown up, and everyone else is choosing to innovate and put the latest capabilities through the paces right now.

After Wednesday’s coming-out party, maybe Microsoft will change its tune.

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Where 2.0: Drawing the Shape of the Flickr-verse

By Michael Calore May 21st, 2009 Categories: Programming, Visual Design

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:


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Google App Engine Now Serving Fresh Java

By Scott Gilbertson April 8th, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

Google App EngineGoogle’s App Engine service had finally moved beyond its Python beginnings to embrace the Java programming language.

Java has been the most-requested feature for App Engine ever since its launch. While the Java support is in “testing mode” for now, Google says its eventual goal is to bring GAE’s Java tools up to par with its existing Python support.

App Engine is Google’s service for hosting scalable and flexible web applications, also known as cloud computing. By adding support for Java, one of the most commonly-used languages for coding applications on the web, Google fills a major gap in its cloud services plan. Amazon, one of Google’s biggest competitors in cloud computing, has long offered support for Java virtual machines in its hosted Amazon Web Services platform.

Java support also opens the door to make App Engine a means of running applications for Google’s Android mobile platform. So far, Google has not outlined any plans for Android GAE apps, but with Java available on both the device and now the server, it looks like Google is laying the foundation for an easy and quick way to develop for Android.

Adding Java support to Google App Engine also paves the way for other programming languages that can run on Java virtual machines — like Ruby, JavaScript and possibly even Scala.

However, it’s unlikely, given Java’s experimental status, that JRuby support (or support for other JVM languages) will arrive any time soon.

If you’d like to play around with Google App Engine’s new Java support, head over to the sign up page and add your name to the list. The first 10,000 developers to sign up will get a spot in the testing group.

Java support isn’t the only new feature for Google App Engine. The latest update also includes support for cron jobs, making it easy for programmers to schedule recurring tasks like weekly reports.

Another new feature is the Secure Data Connector, which lets Google App Engine access data behind a firewall. There’s also a new database import tool designed to make it easier to move large chunks of data into App Engine.

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Video: Django’s Adrian Holovaty Shows Off EveryBlock’s Guts

By Michael Calore April 6th, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

In this 47-minute presentation from PyCon, Django co-creator Adrian Holovaty gives us a tour of the inner workings of EveryBlock.com.

The site aggregates news, crime reports, restaurant reviews, photos and other data for a particular urban area and serves the items through an elegant interface, complete with maps and charts.

Holovaty built EveryBlock entirely in Python and Django, and the site is a testament to the power and flexibility of the Django web framework.

He funded the development with a grant from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, a program which awards grants to start-ups exploring new ways of distributing local news online using open-source software.

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PreDevCamp Aims to Burgeon Palm WebOS Development

By Scott Loganbill February 4th, 2009 Categories: Operating Systems, Platforms & APIs, Programming

A group of mobile software developers in Austin, Texas, have announced the arrival of PreDevCamp, a hacking event centered around software development for the WebOS platform on Palm’s new Pre smartphone.

PreDevCamps are taking place in over 60 cities around the world, including Austin, San Francisco and New York. Also on the list are some unsuspecting mobile development hotbeds such as Vietnam, Croatia and Kenya. The event is currently accepting registration and will be held exactly one week after the U.S. release of the Palm Pre — “coming soon” according to the offical Palm Pre website.

PreDevCamp is already generating some excitement on Twitter and among Palm developing groups, some of which weren’t seeing much action before the announcement of the Pre at Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, in January.

The organizers hope the event will mobilize the development community around Palm’s web-based operating system, WebOS. The operating system and device is set to compete against Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating systems. It’s selling point is software that incorporates Linux and existing web application technologies, such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

William Hurley — more commonly known by his hacker nickname “whurley” — is one of the developers in charge of organizing PreDevCamp. He also had a hand in starting iPhoneDevCamp, a nonprofit meet-up that helped mobilize third-party application development for Apple’s mobile. The first two iPhoneDevCamps were considered a success (and the organization continues to hold mini-DevCamps), but according to Hurley, he and his associates were eager to help provide a legit challenge to the iPhone throne.

That is, if Apple doesn’t put the kibosh on its competition first. The company is threatening to introduce a number of patent lawsuits in order to challenge Pre’s technology before it hits the market. The lawsuits are somewhat limited to certain aspects of the operating system’s scrolling and multitouch capabilities.

Regardless, give or take a few features, it is unlikely Apple’s actions will hold up WebOS from hitting the market entirely. The next challenge would be to see how it will stack up next to the other contenders such as Google’s Android and Nokia’s Symbian operating systems. Both systems are being offered as open source, and there is no word yet as to whether Palm’s WebOS will follow suit.

“Hardware manufacturers come and go, but the company that controls the smartphone OS market is going to control the market, period,” wrote Hurley on his blog. “Watch the developers, they’re the key. The largest, most active developer network is going to win, because consumers want applications.”

The PreDevCamp is the Pre’s first chance at cultivating that community, and thanks to the buzz introduced after Palm’s announcement at January’s CES, it looks like the event is already getting considerable traction.

To see if the event is happening in your city, check out the PreDevCamp event guide. Registration is handled by the organizer of the event closest to you. If there are no nearby events, the organizers have also made it easy for you to set up a camp in your city.

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Processing Hits 1.0: Create Stunning Animations the Easy Way

By Scott Gilbertson November 26th, 2008 Categories: Multimedia, Programming, Visual Design

Processing Example, WatercolorLookout Flash, the increasingly popular Processing language, which was designed in part to turn visual artists into programmers, has announced its long-awaited 1.0 release.

Processing has long been a favorite of animators — the language has been used for everything from animation in Radiohead videos, to web-based tools that can extract a color scheme from your photographs.

Processing is also widely used in academia where even those not naturally inclined to the technical side of programming (that would be us liberal arts majors) have latched on to processing’s ease-of-use and ability to create complex visualizations (for some examples, check out Complexification.net).

Because it’s open source, Processing has also been rolled into a number of other languages like Python, Rails, Javascript and many more.

Given that the new version is a 1.0 release, the focus is naturally on stability. But, while the focus may be stability, there are some new features as well, including an optimized 2D graphics engine, better tools for working with vector files, and new ways to create development add-ons to enhance the Processing production environment.

If you’re tired of Flash animation and you want to try out the new version of Processing — which is free and available for Mac, Linux and Windows — head over to the Processing website and grab the latest release.

[via Daniel Shiffman]

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Amazon ‘CloudFront’ Promises Cheaper, Faster Downloads

By Scott Gilbertson November 18th, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming, Software & Tools

Amazon Web ServicesAmazon has announced its new content delivery network service, dubbed CloudFront, which will help even small websites vastly improve their file download speeds. Like its other services, S3 storage, EC2 hosting and more, CloudFront is pay-as-you-go, offering a much cheaper alternative for small sites.

CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) and just might completely change the way your favorite sites deliver files and could make for a significantly faster web. CDNs are what very large sites (like the iTunes Store) use to make downloads much faster.

CDNs work by routing your browser’s file request from a central server to an edge server — generally located near you — which means your request encounters fewer server hops, resulting in lower latency and increased delivery speed (see our earlier write up for more details on how CNS work).

If you’re wondering why every site doesn’t use a CDN, the answer is that they aren’t cheap. Or at least they weren’t until CloudFront came along.

Because Amazon is using the same pay-as-you-go model it pioneered with S3, E2 and other services, even small startups with little cash can use CloudFront and offer visitors much faster downloads at a faction of the cost. That’s good news for startups that want to launch their own iTunes competitors or offer an online software service like Zoho or Basecamp.

While Amazon’s CloudFront may bring the cost of CDNs down to something small sites can afford, it does have its limitations. CloudFront is, at the moment, only offering 14 edge servers. For comparison, competitors like Akamai have edge servers in the tens of thousands.

Still, while the network is small at the moment, look for Amazon to continue expanding it — especially if CloudFront catches on with developers.

If you’re curious, have a look at the developer guide and be sure to check out the full documentation for the details on how you can integrate CloudFront into your site.

[via Simon Willison

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