Author: James

This week’s Hangout guest is Paul Ramsey of OpenGeo and chair of the PostGIS steering committee. We’ll be talking about PostGIS (surprise, right?), why spatial databases are treated as special and why OpenGeo has been successful providing solutions using open source software when clearly anyone can download all the software for free.

We’ll be talking on the IRC channel again so either show up to the Hangout page on WeoGeo or better yet, point your IRC client to #hwjf on chat.freenode.net. I’ve you’ve got a question you’d like Paul, Madeline or myself to answer, please post it on the Google Moderator page and we’ll be sure to address it.

We’ll see you Wednesday at 10am PDT!

Apparently Apple thought they could release their own version of a mapping solution where it integrates Yelp and other 3rd part services into something that helps people find the best coffee shop near them and then navigate there. Humans, used to how Google does things, were very unhappy. I used the new Maps.app to find the new Togo’s (yes they finally came back to Phoenix) and then navigate there. Worked awesome, but clearly YMMV. I’m sure you as I are already sick of the Apple Maps “news”, but read Marc Prioleau’s article on Apple. Well worth your time.

Well, welcome to the mapping world, Apple. I wish them the best of luck, as an iPhone user but also as someone who really wants them to succeed. We need more options, not fewer. But today’s debut performance wasn’t the result of that team not trying. If Apple wants to be one of the Big Three map platforms, they’re going to need to get serious.

The big news though is MapBox winning the Knight News Challenge, half a million dollars worth! They are going to work on “core tools” and improve the community site. Says Eric:

It’s not about the maps, it’s about the data

Yea, tell that to Apple.

Apple fans are not sure what to do about the poor Apple Maps app. Fire, Fire, Fire, Fire, Fire….

Steve and I talk about deCarta/Google patents, NoSQL, the shapefile being awesome, and why you need to know more than just being a GIS professional. Plus Steve fell out of his chair when I said I was going to URISA.

IRC Log is available on the WeoGeo page.

So this just happened:

We just released TileMill 0.10.0, the latest version of our open source map design studio. This release redefines the creative possibilities for web cartography with its new support for compositing layers and features, achieving photoshop-like clipping, masking, blurring, or highlighting. This powerful set of compositing operations can be used seamlessly across vector and raster layers all using pure CartoCSS. The compositing now possible in TileMill, in combination with image patterns or raster hillshades, can enable effects of uniqueness and beauty that go beyond was has previously been possible.

Think for a minute all you had to do to get your maps to look as good as TileMill can make them out of the box. I said last week on my hangout that after Python, Javascript was what people needed to learn to be good at GIS. I’ve changed my mind, learn CSS, there is no other way to create cartography for printed or web maps after TileMill 0.10.0.

Someone needs to create a CartoCSS importer for ArcGIS to free their users from those crazy tabbed cartography preference windows. Actually, I can only imagine the headache to create such a tool, just move to TileMill for your cartography.

This from CSS, just awesome!

This week I have Steve Citron-Pousty on where we’ll talk about deCarta patents, NoSQL, why GIS pros think they are smarter than they are and much more. We’ll be talking on the IRC channel again so either show up to the Hangout page on WeoGeo or better yet, point your IRC client to #hwjf on chat.freenode.net. IRC works well because you can join the conversation live and ask me what the San Francisco Giants Magic Number is.

The Google Moderator worked well last week for questions, so if you’ve got something you’d like Steve and I to talk about, add it here and we’ll make sure to hit it.

UPDATE: Yes it has been confirmed, Nokia is providing the mapping platform to Amazon.

As nice as chocolate and peanut butter turned out, sometimes you just don’t want someone else’s API putting raisins in your oatmeal cookies (yes raisins are the work of the devil). Amazon, who has their own mobile platform, has made sure the shriveled up Google Maps API does not have to be used by their developers.

You may have noticed a new API on the Amazon Mobile App SDK tab in the developer portal. When we announced Kindle Fire HD, we also made the Amazon Maps API available to our developer community. The Amazon Maps API makes it easy for you to integrate mapping functionality into apps that run on the all-new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. These new devices will also support location-based services through the android.location API.

I’m not going to apply to see their beta because I have zero use for yet another mapping API. That said as the Amazon Mobile platform becomes larger, developers are going to be looking for these APIs. We can expect this to look like Nokia’s mapping API given that Amazon chose Nokia to provide their mapping technology. Nook aside, every mobile phone/tablet platform has their own mapping API now. Amazon has been on fire (pun intended) lately and I can assure you the moment that Amazon gives these Kindle Fire devices free to Amazon Prime customers, I’ll go ahead and take it.

I don’t see this having much impact on Apple/Android given they both have pretty much solidified themselves as the top two platforms. The “also-rans” of Microsoft, Nook, Blackberry, and possibly whatever is left of PalmOS are now going to have to battle a 3rd platform (Kindle) that is well supported by it’s owner and is innovating at a great pace. I’d suspect Nokia will make more money off providing mapping to the Kindle platform than they will selling their own phones.

Spatial isn’t special, but it sure has it’s own API.

You see in this world there’s two kinds of mobile platforms, my friend. Those with mapping APIs, and those who dig. You dig.

There were a couple of new features to this week’s hangout.

1. No guest – We’ll be going “guest free” about every 4-6 weeks to just have a hangout.
2. IRC – The IRC discussion was great and added to the conversation. Plus the after-show continued discussions on JavaScript, hosted GIS companies, and baseball. Don’t bail next time after the show ends.
3. Google Moderator – It actually was a great way to get questions beforehand. We’ll continue to use it in the future.

The show is up for those who missed it and we’ll have the IRC log on the show page very soon.

There is a small change this week to the hangout. First off the commenting has bothered all of us since day one. YouTube comments are almost worthless and Disqus has issues. So from today forward, we are going to use IRC to manage the discussion. When you visit the Hangout page 15 minutes before the show, you’ll see the web IRC client appear. This will allow you to join the new Hangout IRC channel, #hwjf. Of course you can also just add this to your own IRC client. Just point it to chat.freenode.net and join the room #hwjf. This should make it much easier to have a discussion with everyone.

The second change is we have no guest this week. I thought it might be fun to take a week off and just talk shop, hence the “clever” title. As there is no set topic this week, we set up a Google Moderator thread where you can propose and vote on topics. I encourage you to post a question and vote up. Feel free to vote up this one!

Next week we are back to a guest and I’ve got some really great ones lined up. See you guys tomorrow at 10am PDT.

OK, well maybe not but everyone has a theory about where that quote from last week came from. Here are some of them:

1. Some professor (usually from New Jersey) came up with it in 1988 (or 1987)
2. Roger Tomlinson coined it in the 1960’s
3. Oracle/IBM/Sybase/Informix did a study in the 1990s
4. Kellogg report on AM/FM in utilities back in the early 1980’s [H/T: David Sonnen]
5. Jesus

I think this is a classic case of the old telephone game we played as kids. Eventually when you get far enough from the source, you can’t trust anything. The 80% (or any number you wish) is really just anecdotal at this point. All data is only once removed from being spatial so the number is almost irrelevant. David Sonnen put it very well on Google+:

Like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, it’s a lovely myth. If you’re trying to do real work, it’s not useful.

Oh and yes the San Francisco Giants have a 5.5 game lead on those stupid Dodgers. Yes it is happening again.

The Atlantic – How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

The office where Google has been building the best representation of the world is not a remarkable place. It has all the free food, ping pong, and Google Maps-inspired Christoph Niemann cartoons that you’d expect, but it’s still a low-slung office building just off the 101 in Mountain View in the burbs.

I figured they had offices, but I’ve clearly underestimated the ping pong factor. Time to get Paul to buy some ping pong tables for the offices.

The big takeaway (if you don’t like reading liberal leaning publications) is that humans are still critical to getting these maps accurate, even with the computing power of Google. I can’t imagine a more depressing job than shifting these roads around, but someone has to do it and I’m glad they do.

I’m sure the ping pong makes it all worth while.