Well, friends, it's about time I updated you on what I've been up to lately. Preparation for the upcoming First International Ruby on Rails Conference has been consuming almost all of my free time. I'll be speaking at the conference about the value of the many freely available web services on the internet today, and how, combined with the efficiency and speed offered by the Rails framework, they enable individuals or small teams to produce powerful web applications in very little time. I'll be showcasing my new GPS/photo/trip-logging site called WalkingBoss.
I'm currently enlisting beta-testers, so if you know anyone who has a GPS device and a digital camera (and who likes to get outdoors and use them!), please send their name and email address my way.
I'll leave you with a little snapshot of WalkingBoss Beta to whet your appetite:
My friend Ryan Junell, a very serious businessman, filmmaker, and also the graphic designer for WalkingBoss, is screening his Slomo Video production this weekend at the Lobot Gallery in Oakland. If you're in the area, check it out!
Here's a clip that had me cracking up for like half an hour: The Four Tenors.
Here's a clip that had me cracking up for like half an hour: The Four Tenors.
Came across an interesting article on Nigerian 419 schemes in the New Yorker this morning. It is inconceivable to me that people fall for these things. This article walks through the stages of one man's downfall (he gets a prison sentence) thanks to some creative Nigerian con artists. Sad, but very interesting.
While I was working at MOG these last six months, I was psyched to discover Justin Palmer's excellent javascript image cropper. I posted a small fix for it, enabling it to draw northwest, and then incorporated it into our codebase so that users could edit their photos easily after uploading them. It was a simple and elegant piece of code that integrated nicely with Prototype's utility classes (Position, Builder, etc).
So, when the time came for me to implement similar functionaltiy over a Google Map, I decided to take another look at Justin's code to see if I could adapt it to life in a cartographic environment. The result was Cropper.Map. I've only tested this a few days, and only on Mac Safari and Firefox, but so far it's working well for the needs of WalkingBoss Beta. Here's a screenshot:
A couple of notes:
- To avoid getting crazy coordinates after a user drags the map to a new position, I followed the advice of Mike Williams in this posting. As he warns, this code will probably break near the international date line.
- To create the box, you click once to start it and once more to finish it. This is not the most common rubber-band-box user interaction, but it's the best you can do , given that the mousedown event is sort of broken in Google Maps.
- Here were a couple useful references I found when creating this: