BritishIdeas
Interesting Tech Projects
Why Adobe Has Lost the Plot
Mar 4th
Flash and PDFs are staples of the internet and have been for many years now. I used to develop some flash applications but not anymore as Adobe really has lost their way.
Adobe Reader
Sadly it appears no longer possible to directly download this application and install it. Now you have to get the “Adobe Download Manager” first which then forces you to get a McAfee security program at the same time as Adobe Reader. There are no options to cancel the download or installation of this program and it doesn’t matter that I already have security software on my PC. When will Adobe realize that people want to be able to choose what to download and install? No thanks.
Adobe Flash Player
Back when I bothered to write applications for flash (note – not adverts but client-side file processors and mapping tools) I installed the debug version of Flash Player so I could use FlashBug for debugging. Ever since then Flash Player continually crashes on me when visiting most websites with flash (such as CNN). This is despite uninstalling the debug version and installing the regular version. Sometimes I can dismiss the crash errors and it keeps working and other times it freezes Firefox for several minutes before crashing that too.
On setting up my new Windows 7 installation Flash Player forced me to close Firefox before it would continue – rather than closing and restarting via the add-ons window like all other plugins. After installation FireFox now will only start in “Safe Mode” with many features disabled. Wonderful.
Thanks Adobe for a really great user experience! Or should I say software engineering failure.
50,000 Point GPS Track in Silverlight
Mar 1st
About six months ago I posted a video showing a GPS track with 7,000 points in a slippy map control called DeepEarth. If you watch the video you can see that the track lags behind the map a little and I think I was at the limit of what was usable.
Yesterday I wrote about my new C# based slippy map control for Silverlight and Moonlight that can display 50,000 map markers and I wanted to see what it’s performance was like for a GPS track. I created a random track with 50,000 points in it to simulate a track from a GPS unit. Here is the result. More >
50,000 Map Markers in Silverlight
Feb 28th
There are a range of pan and zoom map controls (sometimes called slippy maps) available for C#/.NET and Silverlight/Moonlight. All the ones I’ve seen have something in common – they are bloated. The authors attempt to address the needs of as many users as possible and the result is large downloads and far too many features. The forums and mailing lists are full of people asking how to achieve basic functionality because they are lost in the vast realm of classes.
Of course, it is possible to remove what you don’t need but that requires understanding the code and after all that effort you are left with code that might not have the right license for your needs. The solution? Time to cringe – reinventing the wheel.
Fortunately it’s not much of a wheel, assuming your requirements are simple as mine are. C# and good development tools (Visual Studio and MonoDevelop) makes it easy to quickly develop a lightweight and flexible slippy map that can be used in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (using Moonlight). More >
Poster Map of East Yorkshire
Jan 19th
Using data from the OpenStreetMap project (taken a couple of days ago) along with some utilities such as Maperitive and custom software, I have generated a 39 inch x 31 inch poster of the East Riding of Yorkshire. This map includes hillshading and contour lines and individual streets can be seen.
Some assembly is required. Print it out on A4 paper, cut out the sheets and then glue them together. Download it here.
Here is a sample:
So You Want to be a Cartographer?
Jan 16th
Love maps? Want to make your own? Now it’s easy thanks to a set of free software.
Previously I wrote about the OpenStreetMap project, which allows anyone to edit a map of the world. People can add points, lines and areas and “tag” them to show what they are. Once the data is uploaded a new version of the map is generated for everyone to see.
For example I could create a point on the map and tag it with “railway=station” to indicate that it is a train station. I could draw a line and tag it with “highway=residential” to mark the line as a residential road. I could also draw an enclosed area and tag it with “landuse=forest” to show that the area is a forest. There are many different tags that can be used to represent all kinds of things that appear on maps.
This article is in the form of a tutorial to get you quickly started creating your own maps. I will introduce the software involved and show how to use it step by step. The result of the tutorial is a map of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, which is a steam train service on a historic train line in England and is featured in the Harry Potter films.
Driffield Train Time Lapse
Jan 1st
A five second video I made today from the footbridge of a Hull to Bridlington train stopping at the station in Driffield. As the train arrives in the station you can see the level crossing barriers behind it go up and traffic resume.
Optimizing DeepEarth For GIS Mapping
Sep 5th
DeepEarth is an interesting Silverlight project. It allows interactive tile-based maps to run in a browser with overlays of custom data, however it suffers from some performance problems.
Large GPS Track Logs
I had the need to display GPS tracks in DeepEarth. GPS tracks can contain thousands of points. DeepEarth has three update modes called ElementUpdate, PanOnlyUpdate and TransformUpdate for showing features such as tracks:
- ElementUpdate recalculates the point positions on every map movement. This produces an accurate track display but gets slower as the number of points increases.
- PanOnlyUpdate recalculates point positions during panning and hides features while zooming. Not too useful for me and didn’t seem to show anything anyway.
- TransformUpdate draws the tracks to the map once then scales and pans the vector graphic in synchronization with the map. This makes it very fast. Sadly the scaling code is flawed. Lines disappear as you zoom in and sections of the tracks become distorted, almost looking like calligraphy.
I wasted many evenings trying to get the scaling in TransformUpdate mode working before giving up. I then turned my attention back to the ElementUpdate mode to see where the bottleneck is. More >
Smooth Zooming and Panning Time Lapse
Jul 14th
I have worked out a method to allow zooming and panning for time lapse movies. More work is still needed, but here is a short sample of storms last Saturday.
Forest Fire Time Lapse
Jul 12th
Here is another time lapse, this time of a five acre forest fire on the mountain range outside of Tucson. The fire is about 10 miles away. The time lapse was created using 10MP images with the camera at full 3x optical zoom. The images were then cropped to 1920 x 1080 to create a high definition movie.
The total elapsed time shown was one hour and 41 minutes, compressed into two minutes at 24 frames per second.
Motorized Panning During Time Lapses
Jul 7th
A time lapse video can be made to look really good if the camera is panned while the picture taking happens. The result is smooth motion during the video, and there are plenty of examples of this on You Tube.
There are lots of ways to make cheap panning mechanisms, with the most popular involving an old egg timer. However these approaches have some limitations:
- Once the panning starts you don’t stop it, even if you panned away from an area where something happened 10 minutes after the start
- The panning is typically a linear motion – the same speed all the time
- Most panning mechanisms do not have vertical panning, only horizontal
Number one comes from the limitation of having to set up the motion before starting to take the pictures. It can be difficult to anticipate in advance what might happen in the scene and once it does even if the motion was somehow changed, it would have to change slowly to avoid disrupting the video in a jarring way, missing the item of interest anyway.
Number two can be solved by using a PC or microcontroller to control the camera motion in more complex ways. However this is added time and expense for design and setup.
Number three can be solved by using two motors, one for horizontal and one for vertical. Again, unless the motion is very simple and defined in advance, a PC or microcontroller would be needed.
