Categories
GIS Thoughts

What happens to SVG now ?

With todays purchase of Macromedia by Adobe – what is the future for SVG. For me Adobes support of SVG was a lifelife to lukewarm support from the rest of the industry which supported flash as a platform for developing interactive graphic applications. SVG offers potentially much more than flash for developing data driven applications – but the battleground between the technologies was always going to be on the webpage – and is seems that battle may now be lost.

I cannot see Adobe supporting both SVG and the SVG plugin along with developing flash which must be the main reason to acquire Macromedia.

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

Categories
GIS

BBC Election Flash map

The BBC today posted an interesting Election map contianing candidate and constituency details for the upcoming election. Its always intersting to see a non-GIS approach to a developing a mini-site like this. I think we have a lot to learn as a industry here from the media on understanding user needs.

Also another Flash based site.. another nail in the coffin of SVG ???

Categories
GIS Thoughts

More on Open Geodata

I went along yesterday to the Open Knowledge Forum meeting on Open Geodata in London. Overall I was very impressed by the debate, apart from a couple of exceptions we seem to be moving the arguement away from the simple “free data good, charging for data bad” mantra – in particular Roger Longhorns’ presentation was a well balanced review of the availability of geodata around the word and the various models used to fund it. Hopefully this along with the other presentations will be posted on the web in due course.

The process of community-based efforts to capture copyright free geodata is slowly beginning, it will be an uphill struggle as the capture and maintenance of Geodata is expensive, but then again so is the development of Operating Systems.

No I don’t see a Linux like Mastermap appearing anytime soon, but a national street map could be possible within a couple of years.

Written and submitted from the BMI lounge at Dublin Airport, using a free 802.11 network.

Categories
Technology

Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” to ship April 29

apple.com in black
The Apple website turns black !!

The latest version of the best desktop operating system Mac OS Tiger is set to ship within weeks, priced at £89. Look for special events at the AppleStore Regent Street.

Categories
Technology Thoughts

Is that a gadget in your pocket …

Silicon.com reports that the average London commuter carry’s £500 ($1000) worth of electronics with them on their journey to work. It’s easy to see how this all adds up, and I’m often packing a mobile phone, blackberry, ipod and powerbook whenever I travel.

What ever happened to device consolidation most of the above devices functions could be combined and delivered on a smartphone like the Sony Ericsson P900?

Well I used to have a smartphone and for me anyway it is a question of ergonomics, I find it easier to use my blackberry for email and diary/contacts and my SE V800 as a phone because I need to look at the screen of one at talk into the other at the same time.

I’m sure convergence will come but I think we need some far more innovative smartphone designers – roll on the much talked about iPhone from Apple ?

Categories
GIS

Open Source mapping in the press

Once again the issue of “free” and Open Source mapping has been raised by the Guardian , as always a number of good points are made along with a few Gilligan-isms..

The main thrust of the piece is about the potential of open source, community produced mapping data with interviews with representatives of the Mappinghacks and Open Street Maps projects, all great stuff about producing mapping data appropriate for the use of the citizen using GPS and web based editing tools. It is very exciting and does offer the potential to develop the UK GI industry in many different ways similar to the impact of the open source movement on commercial software development.

However.. you knew there would be one..

The article compares OS datasets which are more detailed and maintained daily by a team of 300+ surveyors, surveyed to 10cm accuracy with very expensive GPS receivers, to the data collected by volunteers using handheld GPS costing a few hundred pounds from Dixons.

I am not critical of the open source mapping movement here, but the needs of Utility companies, Local and Central Government often can only be met by high accuracy, up to date data, which is very costly to collect and for which they are willing to pay.

We need to try and take the political steam out of this debate, as I have noted before the decision as to who pays for the collection and maintenance of high quality data is purely political, but I don’t see any potential UK administration choosing the funding of the OS (£100m ?) above other more pressing social spending such as Schools and the NHS.

There are many needs however which don’t require such high accuracy, high cost data for which the OS does not have a viable product offering. This is where open source mapping and the potential improvements to it developed by other third parties offers the greatest potential. Here the UK could follow the example of the US where a range of GI companies could flourish adding value to this data.

The Gilligan moments then…

INSPIRE will result in the mapping of “every lamp-post, phone-mast, river, mountain” etc in Europe !

VMap1 (that’s 1:250K Remember) classified by US intelligence as the most detailed map ever drawn !

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Would you like a iPod with that..

No surprises but the 1,650 first year students at Duke University supplied with a ‘free” iPod to help with their studies are not using them as hoped for to enhance their academic studies – no they are using them to listen to music – shock !! A few language students are using them to play back foreign vocab, but it is estimated less than 2% of courses have even attempted to integrate iPod’s into their lecture programmes.

A cheap stunt to entice students to the university then.. how soon will UK universites follow, my old place of work Kingston University like all universites will have to compete increasingly for its students, is it just a matter of time?

There was a time when having a GIS course was enough 🙂

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

Categories
Thoughts

Back-up or else

Spent a lot of yesterday trying to recover our neighbours teenage boys ibook and then his ipod following a hard disk corruption. Quite a lot of data was lost in both places as a result of some damaged sectors on the ibooks hard disk. The disk problems needed a reformat and re-install of OS X to fix, but as you can guess – no backups in place.

But before we all throw up our hands and rightly point out the error in his is ways, we are talking about 2000 + songs in itunes, Gigabytes of data both to backup and restore, hours of work for an impatient teenager I think not !

Perhaps the missing part of the “digital hub” strategy is not an iphone or a iMac with a TV tuner but some better way to protect our digital lives…

Categories
GIS Technology

Is the show over ?

Remember the excitement of your first trade show, hundreds if not thousands of people thronging the showfloor, bags full of brochures, silly bug giveaways, I remember one year at Autodesk we gave away bottles of bubble liquid – popular with the kids !!, fond memories.

Increasing distant memories perhaps as the trade show slowly dies in importance, once again this year it appears than the Comdex Show in Las Vegas has been cancelled. This used to be THE IT show 200,000 or more attending five years ago – so what has happened, its simple the vendors no longer see value in it. If you are interested in new technology, detailed specs, independent reviews you may turn to Google and the vendors website before emailing an account manager.

It is not just the general IT industry when this trend is apparent, GIS shows both in the UK and USA are shrinking from their high points at the end of the last decade, the obvious exception here is the annual ESRI user conference which continues to grow. The ESRI show may be a special case with a very active community of users who often receive fee places at the conference along with their software maintenance, but other user conferences seem to be holding onto numbers better than the more generic shows.

The relative success of user shows is clearly partially due to the number of relevant and detailed user presentations on offer to visitors, but there is also an important element which in that vendors are not worried about losing customers to competitors stands.

Written and submitted from my hotel room using the hotels wifi network

Categories
Thoughts

Autodesk changes image

Autodesk

A new logo, a new font,, WHY ??