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Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Guest-blogging at infosthetics.com
I've been guest-blogging recently at infosthetics.com. I started with a post about wikinvest.com and more recently one about a map of European genes that turned into a mini-rant about academic research on the web.
Party Like It’s 1997
Awaiting yesterday's election results, I couldn't help but compare to the 1997 UK general election where Tony Blair and his New Labour movement came to power in a convincing landslide. It was an awesome couple of years we had there, with a government with a proper mandate and a clear ideology – even if they've later disappointed me on many counts (Iraq, ID cards, etc...), I'd still rather have them than the sleazy, obnoxious and complacent Conservatives they displaced.
Anyway, this morning I woke up and for some reason Pulp's Mis-Shapes was going around my head. When it was released, my naive 15-year-old self thought it was all about the rise of britpop/indie music and nerdy guitar bands having their day in the charts. I must have listened to it hundreds of times* without really thinking about it. Thankfully it's bubbled up into my consciousness on a wave of late 90s political memories to remind me that it's all a bit deeper than I first thought.
Listening now, of course this 1995 hit is about meaningful political change, about being sick to death of right-wing politics, about setting things right, about doing things our way:
"Brothers, sisters, can't you see?
The future's owned by you and me.
There won't be fighting in the street.
They think that they've got us beat but revenge is going to be so sweet.
We're making a move. We're making it now.
We're coming out of the sidelines.
Just put your hands up – it's a raid.
We want your homes, we want your lives,
we want the things you won't allow us.
We won't use guns, we won't use bombs
We'll use the one thing we've got more of – that's our minds.
And that's our minds. Yeah."
Jarvis Cocker's a smart cookie. Go Listen!
* maybe thousands of times – the double A-side single was one of the only CDs I had, and the fact that you could use any CD as the soundtrack to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation meant that the song was on repeat in my life for most of that year.
Text along a path in Flash
Trevor McCauley did the hard part years ago, as is often the case, but it seems like there's no source code out there showing text along a path in Flash using actionscript 3. I'm not the only one thinking about this – the degrafa folks have got the extremely capable algorithmist Jim Armstrong looking into the problem too.
I don't have time to write a full explanation tonight (packing calls, tomorrow I'm in Montréal for Design Engaged), but I've got a quick solution which might be of use to you if you googled upon this page. Read on for more if you're interested in a quick overview.
Speaking of tiny details
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)
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.
New Work: Hurricane Tracker for MSNBC
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"
A Quote From Edward Tufte
Edward Tufte, October 27, 2006:
"In choosing templates for workaday graphical productions, it is worthwhile to look for excellent, conventional templates. Conventional templates immediately solve a lot of graphical reading problems for the viewer of the display. But the classics are often classics because they are off-the wall, unconventional, idiosyncratic, one-off, brilliant, historically original performances. Tinkering with Minard's Napoleon's March is no better than an artist tinkering with Picasso's Guernica."
What Have I Been Working On? Trulia Snapshot!
As part of our ongoing collaboration with Trulia we recently released Trulia Snapshot. We were privileged to once again work with the inimitable Ryan Alexander on this, and credit goes to him for the development of the original prototype and the springy image layout that defined the movement and flow of the map. During development, Geraldine Sarmiento joined Stamen full time and was able to help me give Snapshot the polish it deserved after Ryan moved onto another project. Geraldine worked with us as a freelance designer on Trulia Hindsight too, so it was great to have her back for Snapshot.
If you don't have time to try the site right now, perhaps you'll enjoy this promo video made by the lovely folks over at Trulia:
TruliaSnapshot Demo from Trulia.com on Vimeo.
Firehose
Update (June 20th): the 'Firehose' app described in this post relied on Twitter's public timeline IM support, which has been down for several days in a row. Firehose will return when Twitter gets their stuff back online.
About a week ago I made a proof of concept Flash site that I'm calling Firehose. It shows every post from Twitter's public timeline as fast as it can, in a BigSpy style.
I wasn't sure whether to make it public any time soon, but given how interesting people are finding sites like Twistori the time seems right. Blaine mentioned it on the Gillmor Gang podcast yesterday, and it hasn't gone down since so I assume it will cope with more viewers!
I'm using the XIFF actionscript 3 library to speak to a server running OpenFire, and that server has a bot that broadcasts items from Twitter's public timeline as XMPP (Jabber) instant messages to everyone viewing the Flash site. The main reason it needs its own server is because for socket communication Flash is only allowed to connect to the domain it was served from, and therefore it can't connect to Google Talk or AIM from any server I can host it on.
Anyway, you can probably tell that I'm more interested in the technology than whether it's useful or not. It really is just a proof of concept. It's a bit silly because it's too fast to be readable. But it works! (Except when it doesn't. Let me know in the comments if it doesn't work for you?)
Silly or not, Firehose does expose one tiny piece of functionality right now. There's no filtering yet, but it currently highlights "twitter" by default, and you can see what it looks like with other words highlighted by using the URL #fragment, like this, or this, or this.
Clearly there are several next steps I could take with this. The same setup could also be used to subscribe to a particular set of users, or tracked keywords, or (with a little more server-side work) to geocode the tweets and plot them on a map, TwitterVision style. We're just getting started with this, and Twitter is the only public jabber bot I know of with this kind of volume of output (this BBC one looks interesting too though).
NB:– Twitter is a former client of my employer Stamen but we're not working with them officially at the moment. This is the same Jabber PubSub feed they made public a few weeks back, that people are mainly using to power Twitter search engines.
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