If you are from The Netherlands, you might recognize this location?
Check out the github page for more information about the technique.
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If you are from The Netherlands, you might recognize this location?
Check out the github page for more information about the technique.
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I’m going to expand this post and this idea later on.
The basic idea is simple and very much inspired by Siri. I was very skeptical when I first heard about it. When I actually received an iPhone 4S and tried it myself, I was instantly sold. This is a game changer.
Because I’m simultaneously a software developer and a nurse (in training), I’ve been amazed several times by the depressing state of affairs regarding IT and automation in the hospital where I’m an intern. It’s so bad that most of the IT is still ‘shadowed’ on paper, simply because it’s not a trustworthy system: gruesome usability and interaction design, making stuff disappear for no reason, random disconnects, Citrix horror stories… ‘Welcome back in 1998’, was my first thought when I started the first day of internship here.
At one moment I found myself sitting in the nurses room with five other nurses, all fighting with their computers. Then it became really obvious: There’s more computer work going than at my other job in software development!
Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if things ‘just worked’ like in the visualization above? Automation and IT should make work easier, costs lower and quality higher, all in favor of the patients, right? Typing all day and fighting antique Windows systems doesn’t help, at all. Let’s restart IT in healthcare and restart innovating. Start with my idea above please ;)
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Perpetual Ocean shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through Decmeber 2007. The visualization does not include a narration or annotations; the goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience.
Elastic Search is an opensource, distributed, RESTful searchengine on top of Apache Lucene. See Github.
From the Knight Digital Media Center comes this excellent QGIS walkthrough. It covers projections, vector maps, simplification, analysis, exporting and some more.
Another interesting tutorial is this one on how to use Google Refine to export arbitrary data to JSON.
Global Agenda Survey 2011 was built with Raphael.js and D3.js.
D3.js and Inkscape are a powerful information visualization couple, and this tutorial explains some details of how to integrate them into a workflow.
A presentation by Tom MacWright about using node.js, SQLite, Redis and Polymaps.
Not sure if I’ve covered this before but SQL.js is SQLite ported to Javascript using Emscriptem. Check out the demo.
Convert Shapefiles and DBF to GeoJSON using JavaScript
This project allows a user to load Shapefiles and DBFs into the browser with JavaScript. Outputs as GeoJSON for use with other Mapping APIs such as OpenLayers.
Kartograph is a framework by Gregor Aisch (check out his showcase and his blog) for building interactive map applications without Google Maps or any other mapping service. It was created with the needs of designers and data journalists in mind.
Check out the Projections demo and the Three-dimensional mapping demo.
More showcase here.
The core concept of Kartograph is to separate the mapping process in the map generation and map rendering part. The client-side library kartograph.js renders pre-generated maps stored in SVG files.
You can chose among hundrets of ready-to-use maps or simply generate your own using kartograph.py, the open source Python SVG map generator. More about this.
]]>The patterns covered:
It can be downloaded from Github.
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Now you know what a tesseract is, here’s Tesseract, a Javascript library for filtering large multivariate datasets in the browser.
The project uses D3.js (ofcourse), and can be downloaded or forked from Github.
DOH! the project was renamed to Crossfilter.
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lxbarth.github.com/compare/ shows how easy it is to synchronize Leaflet and Google Maps side-by-side. Reminds of this.
Leaflet Vector Layers is a library for Leaflet that allows management of vector layers. It currently supports ArcGIS Server, Arc2Earth, GeoIQ and CartoDB. (Check out the CartoDB demo or the PostGIS demo)
The Open Data Handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data - why to go open, what open is, and the how to ‘open’ data.
Someone should fork this idea and make a Dutch version.
Visible Map is a playground for the MBTiles specification by MapBox.
The data shown here were acquired by Robert B. Livingston at UCSD in the 1970’s: Livingston Brain Data
Chess Demo using three.js and ammo.js.
Backbone Fundamentals is a Creative Commons-licensed book about Backbone.js for beginners and advanced users.
It’s an initiative by Addy Osmani, who also runs a blog with several interesting articles for Javascript developers.
Backbone Fundamentals is a great resource if you don’t know where to start or if you find the typical todo-list examples too limited.
I found the following parts especially interesting:
A rather new article about this company’s experiences building a SPA with Backbone.js:
Single Page Web Apps with Backbone.js [sendhub.com]
Introduction to Backbone.js with jQuery Mobile is a recent article about the combination with jQuery Mobile. Comes with an example project. Others in this series: 1, 2 and 3.
This project is quite complex but a good resource for learning about Backbone and D3.js.
Random Backbone-related resources I gathered in the past weeks:
Planimator is a project by Even Westvang. He uses WebGL to visualize the history of Oslo on the map while preserving the spatial and temporal properties. “The design highlights the continuous transformation of the city, areas of intense development and the sheer workload of the planning authority.”
The background map is generated from OSM and Three.js is used as the WebGL framework.
For technical reasons, try this in a very recent version of Chrome/Chromium/Canary with a proper video card.
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Using D3.js to Visualize GIS by Jos Dirksen is a really extensive write-up of his succesful attempt to re-create the Chloropleth example from the D3.js website.
He explains how he converted the shape files into PostGIS, exported them to GeoJSON, and used D3.js to show them. I wonder how this could be integrated with Polymaps.
More info about D3 geo here and here.
Bonus links:
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Mike Bostock is the author of the excellent D3.js library. If you want to learn D3, or interactive visualization in general, better listen to him.
These three presentations are the de-facto standard documentation for D3:
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“Parallel Coordinates are one of the most famous visualization techniques, and among the most common subjects of academic papers in visualization. While initially confusing, they are a very powerful tool for understanding multi-dimensional numerical datasets.” A well executed live example can be viewed and played with at Parallel Coordinates [exposedata.com], built with D3.js and Backbone.js.
More:
Also, have a look at Gephi if you don’t already know it.
]]>Waterunderground is an interactive visualization of global ground-water fluctuations on a monthly basis from 2002 to present.
It was built with the infamous Three.js.
Navigation is located in the footer.
The data used is from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), freely available here and courtesy of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling.
A web-based flood simulation is developed for navigating over the flood inundation map of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. More here.
A flood game in HTML5 (Youtube)
More videos from Ibrahim Demir of the Iowa Flood Center
OpenScalesGL is the HTML5/WebGL version of the ActionScript-based “rich mapping” framework. The video below is a preview of what’s coming in summer 2012.
Another video, Desktop Firefox (Youtube).
ReadyMap is a free Javascript library for 3D/2D web mapping. It works with TMS/WMS and WebGL. (Github repo).
If your video card and webbrowser are recent enough, check out the demos. Especially this one which renders layers from an ESRI ArcGIS Server.
100% 3D maps, 0% plug-in, currently in beta.
Tip: Try zooming in a bit to Cape Town or New York and click on the label. It beautifully zooms in and goes into more detail. Very nice.
A visualization of the USGS elevation data using Three.js/WebGL. Technical background information here. More WebGL from Chandler Prall.
A WebGL nature scene based upon NVIDIA’s Nature demo project.
This is an effort to integrate some interesting shader based rendering techniques to present realistic-looking nature scene on web using Javascript and WebGL (SpiderGL to be precise). The techniques applied in this demo include:
Nine Point Five is a WebGL visualization exploring earthquakes over the past 30 years. (More information) Built by Dean McNamee who also seems to do nice physical world experiments.
World Flights is a WebGL visualization of major airline flights, built using Sencha’s PhiloGL Framework by Nicolas Garcia Belmonte.
OpenWebGlobe beta from the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland.
SceneJS, a JSON-based scene graph API on WebGL. 2.0 release
Tabata Pro is a timer application for use with the Tabata training protocol also known as High Intensity Interval Training. I’ve only used it for a training or ten, but I can say it works perfectly. It’s definitely as good as the famous Gym Boss timers.
Wild Chords is a free guitar learning app. I actually can’t believe it’s free, because it’s brilliant. In a playful way, it takes beginning guitar players through various levels where you’re challenged to play chords in order to entice all kinds of animals that’ve fled the zoo and lead them back. Also, its built-in tuner is truly genius. Highly recommended for beginning guitar players like myself. If you’re not convinced, have a look at Ovelin’s pitch for the game at Slush2011.
Aelios is a polished weather app. It has quite a unique user interface which isn’t always the easiest, but it’s pretty and it works. It gets updated now and then, and useful new features like bookmarking locations were just added.
Prompt is a Terminal client which can connect via SSH and supports color and fancy key combinations. Can be very handy for remote work, especially if you attach a bluetooth keyboard.
Penultimate is a drawing/note-taking app. It was the first app I bought. I’ve used it in the beginning, and found it to be ideal for quick sketches, not so much for text.
Air Video can stream video from your Mac to iOS devices. It needs a ‘server’ package on the Mac side, which is a free download. It can transcode streams on-the-fly from pretty much every format you can find. One thing it cannot do (yet) is streaming of (physical) DVD’s.
GarageBand. What else do I need to say? I wasn’t convinced when I read about it, you just have to experience it. Excellent value for money if you’re at least a bit interested in music production.
iMockups is a tool for quick user interface sketching using pre-fab elements like input fields and windows. It’s quite limited and I prefer doing mockups in straight HTML and CSS these days. Still, it’s a useful app that I would recommend especially to non-technical people who want to communicate their idea of an interface.
SketchBook Pro is a full featured drawing app. Gallery here. It has layers and loads of brushes, color management et cetera. Recommended even if you’re only drawing snow men while riding the train.
Pages is the only of the three iWork for iOS apps (Keynote and Numbers) I’ve bought, and it doesn’t disappoint. It does everything I expect of a wordprocessor. Since iCloud support was added, even the syncing problems have disappeared.
iMAME is an Arcade emulator (MAME) formerly available only on jailbroken devices. More here
Snapseed is a Photo retouching app from Nik Software. They build expensive Photoshop plugins too, and this shows in the quality of Snapseeds filters and effects. The touch interface is a pleasure to use, especially on the iPad. Next level interaction design in my opinion.
]]>I’m convinced that in the very near future, driven by gaming, WebGL will be available in all major webbrowsers and on most platforms.
This will open the door for 3D simulation like this right in the browser:
If you’re running the dev channel of Chrome or a nightly build of Webkit, have a look at Craftscape. Or try one of the WebGL experiments.
]]>Derek Webb wrote an insightful post on why he as a musician prefers piracy to Spotify. In short, he gets paid $0.00029 per stream of a song played, versus a dollar per sell on iTunes for example. He claims that using Spotify gives a false sense of justification as opposed to piracy, where you know that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist.
Those who claim that the absence of paid artists would lead to less art do not understand creativity: people will always create, it is a compulsion, the only question is whether they can do it for a living.
Fortunately it won’t come to this. There are many alternative ways to reward artists. The simplest is voluntary payment. This is an extension of the patronage system which was frequently used to reward artists prior to copyright, where a wealthy person would fund an artist to allow them to create full-time. The Internet permits an interesting extension of this idea, where rather than having just one wealthy patron, you could have hundreds of thousands, contributing small amounts of money over the Internet.
My idea for Spotify is simple yet powerful:
On top of the Spotify Unlimited monthly fee, add a ‘Donation button’ which behaves like the Facebook Like-button or Google’s +1, and directly donates a pre-set amount of money (default of 1 dollar) to the musician. This would be easy to implement because a creditcard is already linked to your Spotify account.
It can even imagine this taking a social turn, where your donation appears in your Facebook’s timeline: “I’ve donated one dollar to 50 cent”.
]]>Here’s some extra sketches by Mike Bostock (author of D3) I found on the D3.js Google Group:
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In-browser 3D is really taking off and I can’t wait to see where it’s headed. Before we know it, we’re playing the next version of Half-Life in our browser windows. In the mean time, have a look at this beautiful experiment.
It’s created using the awesome three.js, a lightweight 3D engine.
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