Last Friday I finally got my new phone from Geodan, a Sony Ericsson Xperia. Although not the best phone it can run a great application, CacheMapper, developed by my colleagues Paul den Dulk (famous for the OSS library BruTile) and Harmen Smit. Every serious GeoCacher with a Windows Mobile phone should have it.
In order to install CacheMapper I needed a Micro SD card. Unfortunately it was not supplied with the phone so I had to buy one. Luckily my colleague Steven Ottens needed to go to the RAF anyway so he bought me a “SanDisk microSDHC Card”.
RAF is a well known a company with a very good reputation selling quality equipment for quality prices. So you would expect a brand new, quality SD card.
The SD card was supplied in a seamingly new package. But to my surprise the SD card already contained almost 150 photos. Photos on a brand new SD card?!
According to the metadata they were shot with an Olympus FE360, X875 or C570. The people on the photos are Dutch, that’s for sure. They eat Venz Hagelslag during their winter holidays in Swiss and wear buttons with “De Nachtspelen“. It suggests the people are from Amsterdam or surrounding region.
How did this SD card with photos end up in the shop, in a brand new looking casing? Did the camera break down and did they resell the SD card as brand new? Or is it a special action of RAF: buy a SD card and get a life for free!
As the Generic Geometry Library has been accepted into Boost, the library is renamed to Boost.Geometry.
More and more projects seems to notice it. It is e.g. used in the Openstreetmap mapping program Merkaartor and the interest is definitly increasing now it is part of the most widely used C++ library. A bright future awaits Boost.Geometry in the opensource software landscape.
The Generic Geometry Library (http://geometrylibrary.geodan.nl/) has been accepted into Boost. Boost is the well-known and widely used collection of C++ libraries (http://www.boost.org) extending the functionality of C++.
GGL
The Generic Geometry Library provides a generic implementation of geometry algorithms. It has been developed by Barend Gehrels (Geodan) and Bruno Lalande.
GGL is used among others by Geodan Mapper. A very easy to use application to visualise geographically related information.
The 3rd international OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map 2009, was held in Amsterdam. Geodan was present with a Microsoft Surface running Eagle, an innovative application for Disaster Management. At the State of the Map conference it showed its capabilities using OpenStreetMap data of course.
According to my present colleagues it was a huge success. Also the tweets of attendees show their enthousiasm for the Eagle application on the Surface:
The Dijkstra’s algorithm is of course one of the most well-known and implemented algorithms in GIS. And although I’ve used it and knew in general how it works, I never actually implemented it. Until yesterday evening. After struggling all day with my mail client I had to do something to relax a bit. So I just implemented the Dijkstra’s Algorithm in C#. I’m quite satisified with it. It seems robust and memory friendly. Now I just have to create a network based on OSM data. And to add turntables.
Samsung recently launched the i7410 phone with build-in mini projector capable of projecting images more than a meter in diameter. The thing I need now is some kind of touch recognition so you can project a globe and control it with your hands.
One of my colleagues, Paul den Dulk, has created an impressive open source library for tiling called BruTile. BruTile allows among others for effects similar to DeepZoom and SeaDragon. On his blog he explains very well how to use the library.
While the BruTile project itself is impressive by itself, it is even more impressive to see the application Paul developed based on BruTile for the Microsoft Surface in a relatively short time. Different information sources are combined with a gesture driven application to demonstrate the awesome power of BruTile on the Surface. The video shows just some of the capabilities of this remarkable and valuable open source project.
Last month (finally) a couple of Microsoft Surfaces arrived at our offices. In order to investigate the possibilities we have adapted a number of applications. One of them is NASA WorldWind which now runs on the Microsoft Surface and can be controlled by gestures and object recognition.
You can use a compass to make the globe turn around. Zooming and panning is implemented like in most multi-touch applications: moving a single finger pans the map. Moving two fingers towards each other or away from each other let you zoom in and out. Also the globe can be tilted easily by using three fingers where the third finger controls the angle of the tilt.
The compass is a nice demonstration of the additional possibilities of the Surface as you can see on the movie below.
ACES, the Flightsim studio of Microsoft has been closed down. Of the approximatly 100 people only 6 are left to shut things down. So no bright future for Microsoft Fight Simulator.
It also affects Microsoft ESP, a simulation application based on the FlightSim platform. ESP was developed by the same team so it seems this product ends as well. There are no official statements yet. Perhaps on the ESP Insider blog or Developer blog of the ESP team something will get published?
We looked into ESP and wanted to investigate the possibilities to use it as an advanced 3D GIS platform, with data from Virtual Earth, AI, 3D visualisation and modelling, etc. On the other hand if cannot use ESP, we can explore OpenSceneGraph again. We used OSG a couple of years ago with success and I suppose it moved forward so it even better fits our needs.
I’ve finished the base of the topography game. I’m now able to load an image and pan and zoom it. Also it calculates a clicked location from screen to image coordinates. This is not as easy as it sounds, mostly because I try to avoid floats due to the lack of a floating point processor. I wonder how they implement 3D games on the DS without floats and doubles.
If I get the WiFi working it should be relatively easy now to create a simple WMS client supporting panning, zooming and the getfeatureinfo request. Totally useless, but fun to do.
Although, really useless? We are involved in a project, EduGIS, to support geography lessons using e.g. WMS. Most students (or their younger brothers) will have a Nintendo DS.
Well, unfortunately it’s just a home project to play around with the DS, but I could imagine we could do more serious things. On the other hand, we will probably use the iPhone for that. I hope schaaltreinen will blog about that soon I still don’t understand the policy of Nintendo towards ‘homebrew’ applications. iPhone development licences are a lot more clear.
I still don’t understand the policy of Nintendo towards ‘homebrew’ applications. iPhone development licences are a lot more clear.