Categories
Thoughts

Parallax on maps

Once upon a time I was a young teaching assistant teaching Aerial Photography Interpretation,  and one of the aspects that I found difficult to demonstrate was Parallax, the displacement of high features such as towers in photographs. You will see this today when looking at some of the images in Google Earth which have not been corrected to remove the resulting building lean.

Now as a result of the technological marvel thats is WebGL you can seen Parallax demonstrated dynamically in Google Maps, just one of the ways online maps are moving beyond the static paradigm of traditional cartography.

Watch the dome of St.Paul’s as the map is scrolled

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Data Policy

NRE App – just wrong !

Today National Rail Enquires have released a free iPhone app for real time train information. Hang-on you may say, I though that app already existed.. well it does !

For the last few years National Rail Enquires (NRE)  have been licensing at some considerable cost it’s information to independent software developers for them to develop their own apps, indeed one of my favourite all time apps is UK Train Times developed by Dave Addey and his team at Agant.

Todays release is clearly a case of channel conflict by a Quasi-Government organisation, and I would suggest anti-competitive.

NRE should not be developing an app and competing with it’s “partners” who have developed a range of apps for the last few years. NRE should just release the data under an Open Gov Licence and let the ecosystem develop !

So much for the release of government data empowering the software industry, my old friends at Ordnance Survey always recognised this was an issue and kept out of their partners space, not developing a mobile OS maps application despite what I might have argued at the time 🙂

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)