Month: June 2007

Categories
Apple

Would you join the line for an iPhone

Well clearly a rhetorical question if you don’t live in the US, but I might for the experience.

What do I mean, well you meet a different type of person than in your average supermarket line, case in point Robert Scoble reports on meeting Bill Atkinson in the line outside the Palo Alto Apple Store.

Bill was one of the original Mac team and created MacPaint and Hypercard. I absolutely loved Hypercard, and could spend weeks developing stacks, embedding tiny 160×80 quicktime movies and sounds. Before web tools, Hypercard established the principles of hypertext and multimedia applications we are now so familiar with.

I even used Hypercard as one of the main tools of the PhD I did not get round to finishing…

It would be worth joining the line just to meet Bill !

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Google Earth neogeography Thoughts

Plazes in Google Earth

Despite a few hiccups with the latest Plazer client, I’m sticking with my experiment of using Plazes to track my presence and location. I’m glad I have because, the very interested data behind plazes has now been exposed in the form of a plazes KML file. This is really neat, by logging in you can view your own locations, without logging in, you can view the global plazes database and see a real time feed of the latest plazes registered by users. Credit to Tim at Plazes for a really nice use of KML !!

Plazes in Earth

Like the recent twittermap, in can be almost hypnotic watching the geeks of the world posting their locations, and the experience is all the more interesting in Google Earth.

The plazes KML is available for download at www.plazes.com/kml

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, Zurich.

Categories
Data Policy Google Earth opensource

The next step in Open Geodata ?

Projects like OpenStreetMap have proved that it is possible to replicate professional ground survey using low cost consumer grade GPS to create vector data sets that have the potential to complete with commercial datasets. Today I came across a website which describes a technology that could do the same for aerial imagery. Pict’Earth describe combining low cost devices which many of us already have to develop a very low cost real time aerial surveillance platform.

Using a Nokia N95, Imagery and positional information is captured and sent to the ground live during flight on a low cost model aircraft and displayed in Google Earth in near real-time. This imagery can be shared via the web with any internet connected google earth client, anywhere in the world.

Alternatively the same information can be post-processed to produce geo-referenced photo mosaics.

This is just amazing !! Ok so its not orthophotography, but then for most applications that’s not needed, key other than some good software, is the use of the N95, a 5 megapixel camera, a commuincation device and a GPS is a small cheap package – and you thought it was a phone !

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.