Twitter and Contracting

I follow Jesse wardens blog. He is an ace Flash and Flex developer. Though not an RIA map developer, he has lots of useful tips and tricks on general RIA development. I particularly liked his most recent entry on contracting and twitter

Mapping and MVC

I found here a nice article on the Model-View-Control design architecture/pattern. Its a useful pattern to know about and this article lays things out nicely.

Geospatial Thoughts

I started out as a Physical Geographer. The early days of the Internet coincided with my move from England to the US. The possibilities of a geospatial Web led me to GIS in the mid 1990's. I took a Masters degree and dipped my toe into geospatial programming. Over 10 years later I'm still programming. The early geospatial efforts I worked with - MapObjects IMS, ArcIMS and Viewers - were a start. But somewhat unfulfilling for a user; waiting for new map images to reload after pans and zooms was a pain. I always wondered about how the user experience could be improved. This led me to Flash and now Flex or rich internet mapping applications.

My working life is spent surrounded by computer scientists. But, I remain first a geographer second a programmer. People have asked me what that means. I usually reply that I think about my work geospatially. "You mean in terms of maps?" is often the response. It struck me, this is how many think of geography and geospatial.

I'm writing an article for the new LBx Journal. Its aimed at business executives. I'll post it on the blog when I am done. It deals in more depth with this issue. This may form the first in a series exploring geospatial and business. At a basic level how can business take advantage of geospatial? Increasingly I view my work from a business angle. The geospatial community seems focused on the 'building and they will come' approach. If geospatial becomes an integrated part of business, and not separate as it is today, we need to start demonstrating its power to solve business problems. I attend too many geospatial conferences where 'how can we make money' is a central topic. Let's start looking through the lens of a business executive. Understand their perspective, then take our knowledge of geospatial and provide them with solutions. Focus on understanding the problem and monetizing solutions.

Mapping and Sensed Location

Thinking about geospatial, many people focus only on maps. But maps are simply a tool to visualise spatial data. I've recently become interested in sensed locations, or knowing where a user is from GPS or IP geolocation. The latter is fascinating. Taking a best guess at where a user is based on their IP address. There is more on this at the following slideshow

Though there are obviously privacy issues here. Knowing, for example, where a user is when accessing your web site, can help tune the experience. Maybe allowing developers to provide more relevant content.

Local data and search are my current areas of focus. This is very relevant. More on this in subsequent posts.

Everyblock Code Open Sourced

The source code for Everyblock has been open sourced. You can now access all source code . It is a nice application. Their dilemma has been much discussed; how to make money when the code is required to be open sourced. Reading the blurb in the code release page, one feels there is some degree of resentment about having to go open source. One has to sympathise, but when they agreed on their financing they knew this to be the arrangement. Its odd they did not plan on this when they built their business plan.

Flash CS3 Map Evolution

The Flash CS maps I have been building using AS3 is moving along slowly. I shared a link in an earlier blog entry to the first phase. Most of the time here was spent assembling the assets ie. movieclips of each continent/country/state and supporting XML. The XML is tied to the movieclip via a number - <id>1</id>, sprite 1. Thus I have an all continents swf and individual continents eg. northamerica.swf. These are made up of individual country/state movieclips. Clicking on a continent, loads the individual continent swf. Since Flex is the glue for the swf's, I have used eventing to communicate between each of the swf's; flash to flex, flex to flash. The eventing code I used was an adaptation of code shared by Jason Fincanon. The code is as follows:


The next phase of the map I have also now posted.



Here I have integrated the zoom functionality from Peter Organa (see earlier post). Thus the zoom.swf provided by Peter now listens to which continent was selected and loads the appropriate swf. Now a selected continent can be panned, zoomed into and out. This will allow, in the next phase, geolocated pins to be added to the map.

ArcGIS and the IPhone

I took the following from James Fee's blog:

Q: Will ESRI support the iPhone?

Yes, we will support the iPhone as a mobile platform to get maps from ArcGIS Server and do queries and edits on data from ArcGIS Server. We plan on releasing an application for the iPhone later this year and then adding additional capability as part of our 9.4 release. In addition developers can build their own solutions for the iPhone using the REST APIs available from ArcGIS Server.

I didn't think this would be too far away.

On another mobile note. I'm in line for beta testing the Nokia OVI API. Its an interesting process. Nokia have a limited number of beta slots. Once considered you then need to explain the mobile application you plan to build and whether you can get it done in 2 months.