Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Archive for September 2008

Speaking of tiny details

In Weblog on 24 September 2008 tagged hurricanes, Maps, msnbc, permalinks, stamen, Work with no comments

MSNBC just pushed a small update to our hurricane maps, so that the links to old storms will display the last update if the storm is no longer active. Clearly this is useful for those of us who linked to the Gustav map last month!

You can now view archived advisories for the following storms: Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike and Josephine.

Fix for buggy Flash TextField selection (on mouse leave)

In Weblog on 24 September 2008 tagged as3, Bugs, Code, Flash with 2 comments

Today's post is about tiny details.

I've noticed a frustrating problem with text in Flash that I've finally managed to find a workaround for. I'm testing in Mac OS X using Firefox 3 and Flash 9, but I've seen it on other systems too, and recently had help reproducing this bug from our client at MSNBC, so I'm pretty sure it's widespread.

Since this is a fairly esoteric issue that will only bother Flash programmers, I'll continue only in the full version of this post.

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New Work: Hurricane Tracker for MSNBC

In Weblog on 2 September 2008 tagged Flash, gustav, hurricane, information-visualisation, Maps, modest-maps, stamen, tracker, Work with 1 comment

Thanks to a glorious holiday weekend in Bodega Bay, I've been scooped once again by my esteemed friends and colleagues in announcing our work on MSNBC's Hurricane Tracker, which debuted on Saturday. I jumped on this project as soon as I knew we had a chance to work on it, and despite the inevitable project logistics and some awkward travel timing on my part I'm glad to say it made it out before the end of the hurricane season.

There are four storms active in the Atlantic right now:

There's much to say about this, not least the fact that it's the first thing I've ever really worked on that exists in a competitive environment with many credible alternatives.

However, there's still more to come so it will be a while before there's time to properly reflect. For now, let me echo Mike in saying I also think map design for the web continues to be an exciting and vibrant area to be working in, and leave you with a quote from Google's Ed Parsons:

That’s not to say the principals of design are not important in the creation of “maps” for screen display, indeed one could argue for the need of a “new” cartography which adopts rather than ignores the capabilities of screen based maps to portray information dynamically.

— Ed Parsons, "Cartography is dead, long live the map makers"