GIS on the Blackberry Playbook

May 20, 2011 Leave a Comment

Now I’ll be the first one to admit, I’m a total Apple fanboy[ref]That said, I’m still rolling around with an iPhone 3GS[/ref], but I love looking at other platforms.  The webOS platform from HP is one that I’m very interested but Blackberry is one that is sort of a wildcard.  Blackberry has taken its lumps from Apple and Android, but it seems to be holding their own in market share.  The Blackberry Playbook has gotten some mixed reviews, but given that Blackberry is very enterprise, I have to expect them to sell quite a bit of the Playbooks.

WebMapSolutions.com has posted a couple examples of some BlackBerry Playbook geospatial applications.  First off they’ve got an OpenScales demo application running on the Playbook. If you are a Flex/AIR application developer it is a good overview of how one can leverage these technologies on non-iOS tablets running Adobe technology.

The second demo is yet another AIR application, though this one running ArcGIS Mobile. Looks early one, but clearly WebMapSolutions.com has an extensible AIR application running on a tablet that integrates with either open source technology or proprietary GIS systems.

Could it be that Adobe Air and the Blackberry Playbook are about to score a basket?

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Friday Web Map Fun

February 18, 2011 6 Comments

So yea, Friday should be a good day to prepare yourself for the weekend.  To help ensure that I’ve got a couple interesting links to share.

  • TileMill – If you haven’t heard about TileMill yet, clearly you aren’t on the Internets.  One of the biggest issues with creating maps online is you usually either needed a bug bulky desktop application to style them, or you had to go all ninja on notepad.  Either way you end up hating yourself which is never good on a Friday.  TileMill leverages Carto for styling which uses CSS (CSS for map creation has been a huge goal of mine for years).  CSS to me is a natural way to style maps unlike AXL, SLD and MapFile.  All this cartography greatness is rendered with the awesome Mapnik.  Right now you need to stop how you are styling maps and move to TileMill, there is no other choice.  Look at the awesome people are already creating.
  • I’ve been called a Flex/Flash hater (Actually I’ve been called worse, but I can’t repeat it on the Internet), but clearly Flex is here to stay for web mapping.  We’ve seen some APIs from proprietary vendors, but if you want to roll in the open/free/beer crowd, you need to check out OpenScales.  Matt Sheehan has a good overview for open source developers that want to use open source for a web mapping front end, but not OpenLayers.
  • Lastly geographika ponders if HTML5 will change how we map raster graphics.  I embrace that new world and hope it gets here sooner than later.

Enjoy your Friday and weekend folks!

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OpenScales: An Open Source Mapping Framework Based on ActionScript 3 and Flex

December 14, 2009 3 Comments

I’m sure everyone reading this blog knows my opinions about Flash and Silverlight.  I’m of the mindset that I’d prefer HTML Javascript over either, but clearly like my opinion that 3D Globes would too hard for “ordinary people” to use; I’m in the minority.  Given the huge adoption for both for mapping, an open source mapping framework usingActionScript 3 and Flex has appeared.

OpenScales, which has a LGPL license will allow those who want to build “rich” (rich is the keyword for any Flash or Silverlight app, if it ain’t rich, it ain’t a plugin) web mapping applications without need to license proprietary development frameworks.  You can see from the demos that this ends up being very similar to other Flex based APIs.

On top of that, it supports WMS/WFS, OpenStreetMap, IGN, KML and direct image reading.  You can also deploy on mobile using ActionScript 3 (Palm Pre support), web using wlex or on the desktop using Adobe Air.

OpenScales 1.1 was just released last week so the community seems strong and working toward increasing its functionality quickly.  If you are working on Adobe web technology and want an open source mapping framework, you might want to check out OpenScales.

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