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

Posts Tagged ‘modest-maps’

Historical Hurricanes & Oakland Crime

In Weblog on 2 June 2009 tagged crime, crimespotting, hurricanes, Maps, modest-maps, msnbc, oakland, stamen, Work with 3 comments

Continuing three years of exploration and development at the intersection of mapping and time; a quick post about two new things I've been working on at Stamen.

Last week we released a Historical Hurricane map for msnbc.com, a follow up to our forecast tracker from last year which was recently accepted into the SIGGRAPH Information Aesthetics showcase. You can read more about the historical map on the Stamen site, or just go ahead and explore the finished thing:

Further to our updates earlier last month, we just released another round of improvements to Oakland Crimespotting. Mike and Eric have full details. I'm particularly pleased that we're able to open up our archive of around two years worth of data, but also that we're able to try something new with an interface for filtering by time of day.

We jokingly started calling this a time pie, and now we're stuck with it... in a good way. I'm still not 100% sure it's intuitive, but I think that working the real sunrise and sunset times in there should help. The only comparable interface I could find was this:

If you know of any other similar ways of selecting/filtering 24 hours, let me know in the comments!

Cloudspotting

In Weblog on 13 May 2009 tagged cloudmade, crime, crimespotting, Maps, modest-maps, oakland, stamen, Work with no comments

We've been working on some updates to Oakland Crimespotting recently and Mike released the first iteration today. The most significant change is a switch to base maps using OpenStreetMap data. We're using the Pale Dawn cartography that we (Stamen) designed for CloudMade exactly as it's intended: a subtle backdrop for data that still includes the richer local information that OpenStreetMap contributors (like Mike) cover best.

Other changes we've made include numerous small performance optimisations, new sliders in the marker info-bubbles, date labels on the timeline and the crime-type filters now double as a full legend. The whole thing has had a design overhaul too thanks to Geraldine.

We've got a few more features planned for release soon, and we've started a blog to keep track of new developments. Now is a great time to let us know if you have suggestions or feature requests! Feel free to leave a comment here or email info@crimespotting.org if you prefer.

SFMOMA ArtScope

In Weblog on 30 November 2008 tagged Art, Design, Flash, modest-maps, museums, san-francisco, sfmoma, stamen, Work with no comments

Once again I've been beaten to the punch by Stamen, infosthetics, Geraldine, Esquire and more. But here it is for posterity: we released SFMOMA ArtScope a couple of weeks ago. This was a fun one, we're really pleased with the lens approach (rather than continuous zooming) and we're loving the serendipitous bouncing from piece to piece when you search.

Inside info: the artwork is arranged by acquisition date, earliest acquisitions are top left and latest are bottom right.

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"

Modest Maps vs Processing

In Processing, Weblog on 18 February 2008 tagged Code, Maps, modest-maps, Processing.org with 14 comments

Since Mike simultaneously outed me and out-did me and linked to the Processing folder of the Modest Maps source at the same time, I thought I'd better post a version of the library I've been working on so that I can stop thinking about it for a while.

So:

Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash (ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0) and Python...

...And Processing

(more...)

Oakland Crimespotting

In Weblog on 15 August 2007 tagged crime, crimespotting, Maps, modest-maps, oakland, stamen, Work with 4 comments

Mike and I have been working on this all week, and it's time to let people see it.

Hopefully the site is self-explanatory, because now I have to work on all the things I wasn't working on so we could get it out there!