Earthware Blog

We thought it would be worthwhile sending out a reminder that the deadline for the end of support for the Google Maps JavaScript API v2 is now less than a month away, and is due to take place on 19^th May 2013.

If you are concerned about the significant risk of your Google Maps JavaScript API v2 based map being switched off, then do contact us for assistance in migrating up to the latest version of the Google maps JavaScript API.

You may be aware that today Google Map Maker was released in the UK and already we have put this to use for the residents of Letchworth Garden City!

A few weeks ago I was trying to show a friend how to walk from the Letchworth Morrisons’ car park to David’s Books where we were meeting for a coffee. I had previously noticed that the walking directions didn’t use the crossings available, but went the long way around…

Today I have used Google Map Maker to edit the Broadway in Letchworth to add the footpath down the middle, and the road crossings, so the walking directions now show the shortest route (after they get accepted of course). My edits can be seen here: http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=66&uid=213554047047040465663

Take a look and get editing your local area!

Giles

Last night London played host to the inaugural OS Developer Event and it was great to be there. I always enjoy having the chance to meet with members of the OS development and support teams and would recommend attending to anyone!

During the workshop part of the evening we implemented a geocoder for OpenSpace in mapstraction. Mapstraction is an Open Source common interface for a wide variety of JavaScript map APIs. It’s designed to enable a developer to switch from one maps API to another as smoothly and as quickly as possible. The geocoder uses the OpenSpace Gazetteer for town names and the postcode lookup for postcodes. It is not as fully featured as other mapstraction geocoder implementations, but at least what OpenSpace does support is now available.

OpenSpace is definitely feeling slicker after its v4 release, based on the latest stable OpenLayers (version 2.12) with full mobile multi-touch support. It was also encouraging to be reminded that the OS allow developers access to new versions of the API every 2 weeks during development, so that they can supply feedback.

All in all a great night; I’m looking forward to the next event already!

On Sunday 25^th November local secondary school student Jenny Heaton was announced as the winner of Letchworth’s Google SketchUp competition, ‘3D_lgc’. Earthware had been a supporter and sponsor of this competition, and our Director Brian Norman a judge.

Jenny’s superb model of Letchworth Train Station that won her the top prize of a Google Nexus can be seen below, and viewed in Google Earth here: http://bit.ly/VhMnH1.

Other excellent entries included:

The Cloisters, by Worlds6440

The Spirella Building, by Seigeworks

St George’s Chruch, by Matt

The winners were announced at an event in Letchworth Arts Centre which had been organised by students of North Hertfordshire College. All of the entries were shown at the event, giving the attendees and judges a chance to appreciate all of the excellent SketchUp work that has been going on in Letchworth over the past few months!

Brian, as well as the other judges, was impressed with Jenny’s model because ‘’it showed an outstanding attention to detail and the quality of both the model and the photography used stood out even amongst the professional modellers who took part in the competition.’’

Earthware would like to pass on a huge ‘thank you’ to John Webb, the competition organiser. John ran the competition with sheer enthusiasm from day one and we are certain that it never would have received the entries or coverage that it did, without him behind the driving wheel; congratulations and thank you John!

All of the entries can be seen via the following link; http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?tags=3d_lgc, and we would definitely recommend taking a look at all of the excellent competition entries in Google Earth for yourself!

On Friday we received the good news from Microsoft that thanks to the submission of our first Windows 8 app, Meet½Way, we at Earthware are now officially ’Windows 8 Elite’!

So, what is this ‘Meet½Way’?

Meet½Way began back in August as a result of our ‘Earthware Day’.

At Earthware we pride ourselves on being technically excellent. However, in order to maintain this we understand that experimentation with new and varied technologies is vital. We also believe that in order to be a successful organisation we need to work cohesively as a team. Makes sense right? But, as with many organisations, the day to day running of Earthware does not often mean that we work as a whole, but more often as smaller units.

The need for the above is what gave birth to the idea of the ‘Earthware Day’; a day where we work together on a project involving new technology, and nothing else! We make sure that our chosen project is one that all team members can get involved with, whether they are ‘technical’ or ‘operational’, and by the end of the day we’ve all learnt something new about the technology being used, and how we can best work together.

Our most recent Earthware Day was on the 22^nd August and we set ourselves the challenge of building a Windows 8 app in a day! The ‘technical’ team took charge of development, whilst the ‘operational’ team worked on aesthetically designing and marketing the app. And so, Meet½Way was born!

So, what does it do?

Meet½Way has been designed to make meeting friends and colleagues in mutually convenient places much easier. By entering your ‘start’ location as well as that of your friend’s, the app calculates a number of locations that are ½ way in driving time between these. You are able to select from a number of activities that you would like to do together, whether it be eating or going to a theme park, and the app populates a map with these options, as well as providing them in list format.

The app then allows you to share the details of your chosen location and meeting time with your friends as a calendar invite which slots straight into their calendar – so no confusion about ‘when’ or ‘where’ can arise!

How did we become ‘Windows 8 Elite’?

Although we did not manage to finish the app completely on the Earthware Day we made a really good start and have been tweaking it since. On Friday we submitted it to the Windows Store and as a result gladly accepted our invitation from Microsoft to join the Windows 8 Elite Programme.

What does this mean?

As a Windows 8 Elite member we get all sorts of exciting treats! These include invitations to various Windows 8 development events, promotion of our app through the Windows Store and magazine upon nomination, and the opportunity to represent our Windows 8 app at industry events.

When Windows 8 is launched on the 26^th October we’d love it if you could download Meet½Way and let us know what you think! If you like it, you could even rate it for us! And, if you do have any suggestions on how it could be improved we’d love to hear from you.

In the meantime we’re looking forward to developing more Windows 8 apps and are incredibly proud of our new ‘Windows 8 Elite’ title!

In 2010 Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner teamed up with scientists and Red Bull to form the Red Bull Stratos; a project that aims to see Baumgartner free fall from a height of 120 000 feet; the edge of space; to the surface of planet Earth.

Have you ever wondered what this would feel like ? On Sunday Baumgartner will be making his leap, travelling the 23 miles at eye-watering super-sonic speeds, in his attempt to be the first human to break the sound barrier.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9600661/Felix-Baumgartner-to-make-space-jump-attempt-on-Sunday.html]

If  this isn’t something you personally fancy, you could always gain a similar experience by using the Silverlight Bing Maps Control; not quite as glamorous, but, equally not as uncomfortable.

Two years ago when the project was announced we developed a Silverlight application and map that starts zoomed out from your landing point and then smoothly animates the ZoomLevel parameter to mimic ‘plummeting’ to earth.

Read the previous blog post below to find out how we did this, and to take a look at the animation we generated…

… The problem is that the default map animation moves too quickly and you cannot animate the Map controls ZoomLevel property yourself from a Storyboard, as Storyboard animations only operate on DependencyProperties.

ZoomLevel is not the only value that developers have needed to animate in past that has not been a DependencyProperty. The solution is to set the Storyboard animation to target your own class member as a DependencyProperty which in turn can modify your intended object member.

Within your Silverlight control constructor.

Handy Attachments utility class

Most of this was gleaned from [http://www.conceptdevelopment.net/Silverlight/VEMap05/] and [http://bryantlikes.com/archive/2009/03/23/animation-hack-using-attached-properties-in-silverlight.aspx]

Just to make things a little more realistic the Map object centre Location property can be animated to provide wind shear.Instead of animating the Latitude and Longitude separately a Point based DependencyProperty can be created.

Within your Silverlight control constructor.

New property for the Attachments utility class

Now clip the Map to a circle and animate the containers Angle with a regular DoubleAnimation to create a truly sickening spiralling to the ground experience.

The smooth zooming and panning was used to great effect to navigate around the South Africa world cup football stadiums in time with HD video in our World Cup map http://www.theworldcupmap.com

On Wednesday the Bing Maps SDKs for Windows Store apps were released. You can take a look at the announcement here, http://binged.it/Vv6kxi, but essentially what this means for us at Earthware is that we can now upgrade our first Windows 8 Bing Map app from the Beta control version, to the release one!

A Windows 8 Bing Map app you say…

Well, yes! A few weeks ago we decided to set ourselves a challenge – to see if we could build a Windows 8 app in a day. It turns out… that we couldn’t. Alas, we made a great start, and have today been putting the final touches to it.

So… What is it!

Our app is called Meet½Way and is designed to make finding convenient, interesting places to meet friends and family, at a location half way between you both, much easier.

Users enter their location as well as the one their friends will be leaving from, and select from a variety of activities and locations they would be interested in meeting at. The app then populates a map with possible meeting places that are half way between the two start locations – genius!

What Next?

As mentioned, until Wednesday our app still contained the Beta control version of the map. Now however the SDKs that have been released will allow our app to pass the Windows app Certification Kit (WACK) process. This means that once we have our new Basic Windows Store App Key, with a quick recompile our C# app will be good to go into the Windows Store!

We’re hoping to run the Windows app Certification Kit, which is included in the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 8 early next week, and have Meet½Way in the Market Place as soon as possible, ready for the Windows 8 official launch on October 26^th 2012!

As soon as you get the chance, download Meet½Way and let us know what you think! And in the meantime we’ll sit tight until the arrival of more Windows 8 Bing Map apps in the Marketplace…

Last week was a very exciting time at Earthware… our Raspberry Pi arrived!

I have recently started at Earthware as a ‘summer intern’, and so was thrilled to be given possession of the Pi for a day, and struggled to hide my excitement in front of the other, envious developers. I was set the challenge of making the Pi read our Twitter feed aloud to the office. I was asked to create a loop which would refresh every so often and read aloud the latest tweet. If a tweet had already been said, the Pi should ignore it, however if a new tweet was written it should read it aloud to the room, via our TV.

The Raspberry Pi uses the Python programming language to write code, and so as part of the learning process I had to learn how it worked compared with other languages that I am used to writing in. Luckily I found Python quick and easy learn, especially once I realised that it displayed similarities with other languages such as Java and JavaScript.

With the challenge set I quickly got stuck in and started looking into how we could make the Pi actually ‘speak’, and I soon discovered that Python has modules you can use to do different things. I used the ‘httplib’ module to gain access to the internet, and from there used the Twitter API that is made specifically for use in Python to access various Twitter feeds. In order to make the Pi ‘speak’ I found a ‘speaking’ module, and I used the ‘datetime’ module to write code which would highlight when new tweet had been written, triggering the Pi to read it.

After a few tweaks and edits I managed to get the Pi to read aloud tweets from whatever twitter user I wanted! I also enabled the ‘input’ feature which means that users are able to choose how long they want the Pi to wait before it refreshes.

I am pleased to report that I succeeded at my initial challenge of making our Raspberry Pi speak! Only one problem remains… the voice that reads the tweets is not exactly… gentle on the ears… I’m working on it!

Andy

Here at Earthware, we have recently been working on a number of projects showing quite complex and multi-faceted data sets using consumer APIs such as Google Maps and Bing Maps.  This has led us to explore lots of different ways of displaying more than one thing at a time on a map:  We have looked at pie charts, shading, doughnuts (or donuts to our trans-Atlantic cousins).  But, I keep returning to the view that;

1. Maps are never going to replace Excel – when you get more than two numerical parameters that you want to look at at the same time then it is almost certainly better to use a table or at least a different type of graphic.

2. A picture tells a thousand words – but if you try and show too much it becomes a bit more like a “Where’s Stig?” picture (great present book by the way) than a Rembrant.

3. Just because you’ve got the data in a database, it doesn’t mean you automatically put it on the map – so often we see websites and maps that are designed around the needs of the owner “I want to get as much of my stuff out there as I can!” and not the needs of the user “I want to see only the thing or things that most interest me in the quickest and easiest way that I will understand”.

Anyway, I recently read an article by Matthew Erikson who I think really made my points for me in a very detailed way and so I thought I would point you in the direction of his article.

Neil

Today Bing Maps have released their first street side imagery outside of North America in our very own UK capital city London. This first release appears to cover the capitals major roads but lets hope there is lots more to come over the next few months. Below is an overview of the coverage:

Bing’s innovative “street side” interface has been used allowing you to cruise along a street as a long strip of imagery, here is an example going over Westminster Bridge:

The new imagery is available using HTML5 powered street slide on www.bing.co.uk/maps or using the Silverlight panorama viewer at www.bing.com/maps/explore. The street slide tool is brilliant for actually finding locations or shops in a street but the panorama viewer still has the biggest full 360 wow factor:

Obviously Bing have a long way to go to catch up with Google’s coverage of street side imagery but this is a great first step and the first competition we have seen to Google’s since Earthware partnered with Seety’s streetview way back in 2008.