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iPhone Developer for Hire
I am now a “published” iPhone developer. My first app - iFreeThePostcode - went live on the app store a week ago, you can find more information about it on this page.
Before October I had never written Objective-C. Also I haven’t written a huge amount of C over the years, so it was quite interesting to try this out. Every time I’d looked at Objective-C so far I’d always thought it looked a bit odd with the crazy square brackets and the strange method names. In fact here’s a sample from iFreeThePostcode, this is a basic function that receives a new location, stores it for later use and passes it on to another object too:
At Liverpool GeekUp in September Dave Verwer gave a talk about iPhone development. It was quite a basic talk but afterwards I was talking to Dave and he suggested I tried reading “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” by Aaron Hillegass. I also got the same recommendation from Colm McMullan, creator of Yofe, so I decided it must be worth reading. I read the whole book while on holiday and the following week set about writing my first app. If you’re planning to start writing iPhone apps I’d definitely recommend this book, if you feel like using the Amazon link on the right then I’ll even make money when you buy it!
My first app was actually not iFreeThePostcode but was in fact a routing app. I’ve taken the Gosmore routing library from Open Street Map, the same library that’s used for www.yournavigation.org, and have ported it to Objective-C. It actually works really well on the iPhone and can give speedy routes, though so far I’ve had to limit it to small datasets. Hopefully that’s a limitation I’ll be able to work around. It was when I was ready to add the GPS support to this app that I decided it would probably be easier to try with a simpler app first, and from there iFreeThePostcode was born.
iFreeThePostcode is a ridiculously simple app. The aim of it is to allow you to submit postcodes to the Free the Postcode project. This is a project to create a public domain postcode database in the UK, a much cheaper option than the existing database which costs a lot when bought from the Royal Mail. When you start up the app it shows you a few text boxes and your current latitude and longitude (or “Loading…” initially). Your horizontal accuracy is also shown and will start off in red. When your accuracy goes below 100m it will turn green and you will be able to submit your postcode. You have to enter the postcode as two separate parts, i.e. “EC4A2DY” would be entered as “EC4A” and “2DY”. You also need to enter a valid email address, this is to stop spammers sending useless data and to allow some tracking of who has submitted what postcodes. If someone is found to be submitting copyrighted data, their submissions could therefore be removed. Once you click submit you should get a success or failure message. Failures can be caused by not entering a valid email address or postcode, or by problems communicating with the server. If your submission succeeds you will receive an email containing a special link. Click on the link and your submission should show up in the current public domain list of UK postcodes the next day!
I really hope that by making submissions to Free the Postcode really easy that a lot more postcodes will be submitted. Obviously this is only useful to iPhone users but by most accounts there’s a lot of us out there, also this might inspire someone else to write a similar app for Android, Symbian or Windows Mobile phones which would take the idea to even more people.
Though there’s not a lot of code in this app I’ve decided to make it open source. Hopefully it will help someone who’s looking to get started with iPhone development. A few of the more interesting parts would be the code for handling the current location and the code for submitting the postcode to the website. To download the source code head over to the iFreeThePostcode page. The code that I’ll make available initially is basically the same as the code that is live except that I’ve gone through it to add some more comments. There are a few bugs that I’m aware of though and I’ll work on them soon and release a new version to the app store as soon as they’re done. For more information keep an eye on that page.
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PHPNW, web conferences hit the North
Though I’ve spent most of the past three years writing JavaScript, the first five years of my professional career was spent writing PHP. Just 6 months after leaving university I was leading the project to rebuild the fa-premier.com website (now 4thegame.com). This site was, and still is, one of the leading websites for football news, results and stats. As you can imagine this was a big challenge for someone pretty much fresh out of uni. To get the project finished in a short space of time we brought in a few contractors including a guy called Noel Walsh, and a guy called Jeremy Coates. At the end of the project we said “thank you and goodbye” to the two contractors, and I never heard from them again. That was, until a month ago when I got a LinkedIn request from Jeremy.
Soon after, Jeremy invited me along to the monthly PHP North West gathering and while I was there Jenny Dunphy managed to persuade me that I should sign up for the upcoming PHPNW conference.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the conference. The topics in the schedule looked quite varied and interesting but I’ve been away from PHP for a long time and there was potential for me to be bamboozled. On the other hand I might learn huge amounts to bring me back up to date. For most of the day there was two tracks running so I’ll give a quick summary of the talks that I attended here and then finish with a few conclusions from the day. I didn’t take any notes on the day so some of these may be a bit sketchy.
Welcome Keynote: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
In this talk Derick Rethans reminded us all that simple solutions can be far more useful than heavily designed systems in many cases. He reminded us that JavaScript should only be used when necessary, and that pages should always work without it. He also pointed out that though frameworks can be great, there are times when they can just be unnecessary and might slow things down. He also showed us a few of his favourite examples of sites that could just do with being a little more basic. This was quite a light talk but was a good intro to the day while we were all still waking up.
MySQL EXPLAIN Explained
Adrian Hardy’s talk was a good introduction to the use of the EXPLAIN statement in MySQL. He took us through a number of examples of increasingly complex SQL statements and showed how EXPLAIN could be used to alert you to the inefficiency of the queries. He also did a good job of explaining the best ways to create indexes on your tables and simple ways to make sure they get used.
Regular Expression Basics
Ciarán Walsh took us through the basics of regular expressions. Though the subject matter was, as promised, quite basic; it was also thorough and hopefully would give a head start to anyone who hadn’t really used regular expressions before. I have written many regexes before but still found the talk interesting and did learn a few things that I hadn’t used before: using the ‘x’ modifier to allow comments in a complicated regex and the ability to use named matches, and the demos of the ctype functions were also useful.
What’s new, what’s hot in PHP 5.3
Johannes Schlüter is the release manager for PHP 5.3 and he took us through some of the new features that we can expect to see in the next release. This was especially interesting for me as I’ve been away from the PHP community for so long that everything he talked about was new. He started by explaining how 5.3 actually contained all of the features that had been slated for the 6.0 release, except for UTF8 support which is taking longer than expected to finish. The new features include such wonders as namespacing (with the contentious backslash operator), PHP archives - PHAR files - which should hopefully ease distribution of PHP code, support for anonymous functions - a feature of JavaScript that I’ve been wanting recently when writing PHP - and, surprisingly, new support for GOTO!
From HTML to Drupal in 30 minutes
With a few potential projects coming up that will require many aspects that you would find in a standard CMS I was quite interested to see what would be covered by this Drupal tutorial. James Panton and Chris Maiden took us through the process of pulling the homepage for the PHPNW conference into Drupal. The main aim of the session was to show how simple it was to create a new theme for Drupal, trying to avoid the classic problem of CMSes that all installations look the same. They started with the original HTML file for the PHPNW conference site and replaced sections of code to add in the dynamic parts that they wanted which was a great way to show the possibilities for reskinning Drupal. I might have liked to see more mention of the capabilities of Drupal but they did a good job of covering what they needed to in the thirty minutes they had.
HTML 5: What’s that all about?
Smylers, a fellow Leeds University alumni, took us through the process by which HTML 5 is being designed and the aims that the W3C and WHATWG groups have for it. It was good to hear that with HTML 5 they’re trying to take on board the issues that have cropped up with previous versions of HTML and the design processes those have had. It seems that the main aim for HTML 5 is to ensure the browsers behave as similarly as possible, offering a level playing field for website designers. The spec for HTML 5 will go into detail about what the browser should do if it comes across HTML that it doesn’t recognise, the priority here being not that browsers expect perfect websites, but that the browsers will be able to guarantee that they handle the bad markup in the same way as other browsers. The spec will even offer a full set of test cases, a first for a HTML spec.
Twittex: From idea to live in 7 days
Now I hadn’t intended to go to this talk, I didn’t really think I’d find it too interesting. I’ve done PHP projects, I didn’t feel that I needed to listen to how someone implemented their code, which frameworks they chose, that sort of thing. Fortunately this wasn’t what Stuart Herbert talked about, the talk was in fact more around the management and marketing of the project, and the issues they had. He explained that on the day that Twitter announced that the UK would no longer be having twitter SMS updates, he decided that his company should work on a project to bring SMS back. They worked on the project over the course of a week, essentially 6 days coding and 1 day testing, and ended up first to market. Unfortunately when they tried to publicise their efforts they found that nobody was interested any more, a week had passed since the announcement and people weren’t so excited any more. Stuart took us through some of the lessons learnt such as the fact that they should have announced their intentions as soon as they had decided to start the project. TweetSMS and a few other sites had done this and had allowed people to register their interest so that once their solution was ready, they would have a ready supply of people willing to pay money to receive SMSes. They did manage to get an impressive product out after 7 days though by building on their existing infrastructure.
Panel Discussion: State of the Community
The final session was a panel discussion chaired by Jeremy Coates with Steph Fox, Ivo Jansch, Scott MacVicar and Felix De Vliegher answering questions. They started by answering some pre-selected questions and then went on to answer some questions from the audience. The questions covered a variety of topics and the discussion got quite heated at times (backslash namespace operator!) Overall though I enjoyed this session and it was definitely a good way to find out the general state of the community and see what people’s opinions were on various matters.
Conclusions
Overall I think the conference went well, I certainly enjoyed myself. It was well organised and I didn’t really encounter any problems during the day. About the worst thing I could say was that I didn’t find any sandwiches that I liked for my packed lunch (these were provided for us), but with central Manchester right next to the venue that wasn’t really a problem. Registration was painless and probably quicker than I’ve had at any other conference I’ve been to. The selection of talks was good and varied, finding enough good material for two tracks at the first conference was a pretty impressive achievement. Fortunately I can say that over the course of the day I didn’t find myself bamboozled and I did manage to pick up plenty of new knowledge from the talks. I really hope that they put the conference on again next year and I’m sure I’ll sign up if they do!
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New simple URI based map redirection service: mapof.it
I can finally announce, after first mentioning it two months ago, that my new web app is live.mapof.it is a really simple app that lets you get access to maps easily, no matter what browser you’re using. To view a map of a location just put the name of the location after the slash in the URI. So to see a map of New York, for instance, just go to mapof.it/new york. You can see a route between two places by just listing the two places with a slash between them. To get a route between two UK postcodes you could go to mapof.it/ec4a 2dy/ec1n 2ns.
It’s such a small and simple app that there’s not really much else left to say in this blog post. Please head over to the site, take a look at the examples and have a play. I’ll be adding more features in the coming days and weeks so it’s worth keeping an eye on it. If you have any suggestions for new features or have any problems, I’m experimenting with Get Satisfaction for this project so head over there and let me know your thoughts.
I realise it hasn’t only been 2 months since I sent that twitter but also since my last blog post. I’ve got one nearly completed and a few more in mind so hopefully there’ll be more soon. I’ve also been posting more recently to blog.mapme.at so head over there if you haven’t seen it, hopefully there’ll be a few more posts on there soon as well.
UPDATE: Some sites don’t handle single line queries too well and can be improved by sending the country code as a separate parameter. You can now do this by putting a colon followed by the country code after your query, for example, mapof.it/mm/liverpool:gb - more examples on the site: mapof.it
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Location tracking on a "geo" social network
A few days ago I spoke at GeekUp Liverpool about a site that I’ve been playing around with for just over a year. This is the second time I’d spoken publicly about it, the last being at WhereCamp, so I thought I really should put something on my blog too.
mapme.at is a site that I’ve been working on to allow me to log my location in a number of different ways. I originally set it up after the BBC/Yahoo Hack Day in 2007 as somewhere to put the code that I’d written for tracking my location using DNS. Since then I unfortunately haven’t really had much time to spend on it but have managed to develop some parts of it so that it has, for instance: FireEagle and Twitter (direct messages) integration, mapping location through DNS, email, web and mobile app, and the beginnings of a social network aspect.
I recently set-up a blog for it too, the first post highlights a few of the reasons that I think location tracking can be useful on the web. I’ll probably go into more details on that in future posts too. The second post is more instructional, about signing up and creating your first “favourite” on the site, again I’ll likely write a few more posts along those lines. I’m also hoping to go into some detail on the development of the site, including some issues I come across - the first of which is likely to be looking at methods of removing errors that my GPS sends through to the site.
Though the site has been in development for over a year, I really been able to put much time into developing it, tending to add a feature that I want from time to time. Also the site is in definite need of some sprucing up, hopefully I’ll get to that, or get someone else onto it soon. That said it’s quite functional and has a number of interesting ways that you can use to log your location, so get on there and set yourself up with an account or read more over on the mapme.at blog.
Trace of a 5k run on the River Mersey
(straight lines are my trip from and to home which I didn’t trace). -
OSM Quality Evaluation
Muki Haklay recently put together a blog post about a report that he has been working on over the past year on the evaluation of Open Street Map (OSM) data. I thought I’d link to it here partly to highlight the interesting work he’s done here and also to make a few comments. If you’re at all interested in the OSM project then be sure to head over there and read it.
One of the aspects that I thought he may have missed relates to the way OSM relates the history of OSM entities. A comment I made on his blog follows:
As far as I can tell though the research doesn’t take into account the history of elements in OSM? When you’re looking at the number of users that have worked on an area, you may actually be discounting users who have worked on an area in the past but whose username was then replaced by later edits? I think it’s very important to take this into account as the very peer-reviewing that you are demanding can actually result in the appearance of *less* usernames.
His reply makes it clear that he has thought of this and that he’s happy that by inspecting the data at the level of nodes this is less likely to be an issue. It’s true that in the majority of cases a fix would involve simply moving a node or two along a way. Even though both of the main editors now give you the ability to move a whole way (and all the nodes) at once, which would result in the replacing of the username on the way and all nodes, I’ll admit that this is unlikely to happen very often. That said though, I’m still a little nervous about completely ignoring the history. Any comparison that concentrated on nodes, e.g. only POIs, rather than ways and nodes would have to take this into account much more but clearly Muki’s aware of this and is likely to take it into account in the future.
The report (and indeed the blog post) features the above image showing the difference in coverage between OS Meridian and OSM across England. Blue areas show where OSM coverage is good and red shows bad coverage (compared with OS Meridian). I was initially disheartened by the big red blob over Liverpool and most of the North of England. When I looked at the full size version and squinted a bit I was able to see that South Liverpool shows up as a very small blue smudge amongst the red. The following image is a closeup featuring Liverpool and Manchester. From this it’s much easier to see the South Liverpool and Chester are actually pretty well mapped as well as the South West quadrant of Manchester and a few other places, but the majority of the North needs work. Think we need to get some mapping parties planned!
(It’s also worth noting that the data used for this is at least a few months old by now too, I know the Wirral is looking much better these days and some work is being done on Manchester and Leeds)
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Multimap and OSM Maps on Nintendo Wii and DS
For some reason I’m writing these posts in reverse order of when I actually bought the devices, but a few months ago I bought a Wii. Of course one of the first things I did when I got it was to get hold of some Wii Shop points (by converting the Nintendo star things I got when I bought it) and then to try my simple, functional map page on it. This actually worked pretty well, though on my old fashioned standard definition CRT TV the maps look a little fuzzy, basically everything about the map works. It drags, you can click on the map type buttons to switch types. The pan/zoom widget acts a bit funny but generally it’s ok. After a short while playing about with it though I decided it wasn’t quite intuitive enough, not wii-like enough. I started looking into what you could do with the browser with JavaScript and was happy to find that you can actually get a complete set of information about the wii remote’s status. Unfortunately though you can only get this information while the remote is pointed at the screen. Initially I had ideas of tilting the remote in the direction you wanted to pan the map, but as you’d always have to be pointing at the screen there didn’t seem too much point, currently the following interactions are available:
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Hold down the “1” button and point the cursor in the direction that you would like to go, map will pan in that direction.
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Aim the cursor at a point on the map and press “2”, map recenters on that point.
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Aim the cursor at a point and press “+” or “-“, the map will zoom in or out on that point.
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Drag the cursor on the map to draw a rectangular box, when you let go the map will zoom in to fit that box in the map (note that this means dragging the map no longer works).
I opted for removing the default dragging action because I tended to find that waving the remote from side to side to drag the map around just wasn’t fun, pointing in a direction and holding a button was a lot easier. I would also have liked to make the zooming in and out more interactive. As mentioned in the previous post, the Multimap API doesn’t expose the functionality for doing smooth zooming, if that were exposed it might be possible to make this a little more interesting. I may look into this in the future when I’m contracting for Multimap if I’m working on the API again. I think the most fun thing would be to access the information from the Wii Fit and navigate the map by tilting your whole body, but unfortunately the Wii Fit doesn’t seem to be compatible with the web browser.
The following video shows it in action. It’s pretty basic, it starts with moving the map around, zooming out one level and then demonstrates the map type widget before zooming out once more:
Now onto the Nintendo DS. I’ve had a DS for a few years now but only got around to buying the web browser earlier this year. The DS browser, like the Wii browser, is made by Opera and is based on the same code as their desktop browser (I think). I was amazed to find that there was actually a good level of JavaScript support in the DS version. Although the Multimap API wouldn’t work on it at first I did manage to get a build working without too much difficulty. The main problem was that the DS browser will not start loading an image until it is visible on the page. The Multimap API however will not make a map tile visible until it has loaded, a slight catch-22 situation. I made a special build that did not have this feature and did get slippy maps to work on the DS but the performance was pretty bad. I’m afraid I have to say now that this was about as far as I took the DS maps. Eventually I knocked up a very simple page that you can see here: maps on the cheap.
A little more hopeful on the DS is native maps applications. Someone has begun working on a home brew maps application. Currently it’s very basic and will just show you some basic Google maps but I’ve talked to the guy working on it and hopefully before long he’ll be adding support for OSM maps in there too.
Technorati tags: api, nintendo, wii, ds, osm, map, openstreetmap, multimap
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Multimap and OSM Maps on iPhone
I really did think that once I’d left Multimap I’d be doing lots of blog posts about all the technologies that I’d been playing around with. Somehow even though I’m not working I’ve still been really busy, I didn’t get time to write any code until last Wednesday!
Anyway, last week I finally gave in and bought myself an iPhone, of course one of the first things I did when I got it was to try my simple, functional map page on it. This map page is just a basic Multimap Open API implementation that I’ve set up with just enough features to do what I generally need. It shows OSM maps, it allows geocoding (hover over the white bar at the top to have it drop down), it has mouse-wheel zooming and it lets me click through to edit the OSM maps at the point I’m viewing, that’s generally about all I need. Oh yes, it’ll also remember your last viewed location in the hash of the URL and in a cookie, I have it set-up as a bookmark at the top of my browser simply labelled Map (feel free to drag that up there yourself).
If you look at the page in a regular browser you’ll see that it’s pretty basic, though it does have a 5 elements “obscuring” the map (ignoring the logos) the full-screen nature of the map makes this less of an issue. However if you take a look on an iPhone, the story is a little different:
As you can see, things are a little cluttered so I needed to strip things down. The link through to multimap is a bit useless as you can’t print from an iPhone and using multimap’s site to lookup a route would likely crash Safari so that went straight away. The OSM editor is written in flash which the iPhone also can’t handle so the “Edit this area” link went too. After that it’s just the widgets. The location widget is useful but not absolutely required so I pulled that one out. The buttons on the pan/zoom widget are too small to click on the iPhone so I got rid of that too. The map type widget was quite functional but just too big so I decided to keep that in but try to find a way to get it out of the way.
My first attempt at keeping it involved restyling the widget. All of the widgets in the Multimap API can be completely restyled. The API supports you in doing this by allowing you to pass a “class name” when constructing the widget. When you do this the default Multimap class name, e.g. “MMPanZoomWidget”, is replaced by your own, e.g. “altpanzoom”. The resultant widget has no styles whatsoever and can be restyled in whatever way you want, more info about restyling widgets here. I decided to try shrinking the text a bit and then just giving the widget a basic white background and black border.
The problem with restyling the map type widget though is that it has a lot of extra behaviour built in; it can display relationships (click on “Mapnik” and then click on the arrow that shows up, you then get a menu of “Normal”, “Highlighted”, “Mobile”), it can display alternative map types (when an arrow pops up next to “Map”, click it to be offered alternatives such as “Ordnance Survey”) and there’s also a lot of interaction involved in the “Bird’s eye” maps. What this means is that if you want to do anything more complex than changing fonts or colours, restyling the widget is a lot of work. And after all, the widget looks quite nice and it’s shiny nature might fit in quite well on the iPhone so I really wanted to keep it. That’s when I came up with the idea that I’ve decided to stick with. When the map comes up there is a single relatively innocuous button marked “Map Types”. Clicking on this dims the map and pops up the Map Type widget in its full glory, you can then enter the menus or select a map type as you desire at which point the widget disappears and the map shows up again. You can also click the “X” if you decide you don’t want to change map type after all.
Final visual problem is the search box. The iPhone doesn’t really do mouse hover type events too well so I couldn’t really have it popping down, also it was a little big to start off with. I ended up shrinking it down and popping it permanently into the top right corner. Removed the descriptive text and the submit button as they’re not all that necessary.
Of course once you’ve removed the pan/zoom widget it does become a little more difficult to interact with the map. By default Safari on the iPhone does not create the necessary mouse related events to allow any of the default map interactions to work. These would be dragging the map, double clicking to zoom in and double right clicking to zoom out. With version 2.0 of the iPhone software, Apple have allowed some access through JavaScript to the gesture interface. Although their documentation wasn’t great I did find some useful documentation elsewhere. I’ve now managed to setup the page so that the pinching gesture allows you to zoom in and out, and clicking somewhere on the map will move the map to that point. While it would obviously be nice to be able to drag the draggable map, it seems the iPhone is not really capable of doing this with the Multimap API. In fact I’ve also tried a similar thing with the Google Maps API and it just seems the iPhone is not fast enough to provide live draggable maps with the APIs as they’re currently built.
So to conclude, this now works relatively well, it should be able to show me OSM maps when I’m out mapping and show me Ordnance Survey maps while I’m walking in the hills. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like dragging the map will be possible any time soon. It would also be nice to be able to have the map scaling more interactively, so that you can be sure you’ve pinched enough to show what you want to see. The Multimap API doesn’t currently expose its map scaling functionality in a way that outside developers can make use of it, even if this was changed though I doubt the iPhone would be fast enough to make use of it. Really this just started out with me attempting to tidy up the map a little so that it could work with the iPhone and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. If you want to try it out just go to http://johnmckerrell.com/map/ on your iPhone, it’s the same URL for normal web browsers and for iPhones, it’ll detect which you’re using and display it appropriately.
Check back here shortly to read about my attempts to display maps on Nintendo devices, for now though here’s a final screenshot to show how well the map and widget work in horizontal mode:
Technorati tags: api, apple, iphone, osm, map, openstreetmap, phone, multimap
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No longer a blue badge holder
So I’ve left Multimap and I’m no longer a Microsoft employee, I have relinquished my blue badge and handed in my laptop. I’ve really enjoyed working at Multimap. The people I’ve worked with have all been friendly, incredibly intelligent and fun to be around. Not only has working with them been great, but the many times we’ve managed to meet up outside work has also been fun, including my wedding and stag do and lots of other occasions too.
Three years ago Fake Ed Parsons came to me in a dream and told me the secret to draggable maps. I knocked something up and then sent an email through to Multimap. Apparently the email was passed on to Sean Phelan, the founder of Multimap, who then passed an email around the senior management asking which of the following options they should use:
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Tell me to stop
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Sue me
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or offer me a job
I’m obviously quite happy that they decided to go with the 3rd option! I worked for Multimap as a contractor for 6 months and then started working there full time at the end of September 2005. Since then I’ve worked on the API full time. Though I’ve written nearly all of the JavaScript in the API it wouldn’t be much use without the work put in by others in the team to build the many great web services that it uses. “Tiling the world” to make sure we had map tiles and imagery in as many places around the world as possible was also a huge undertaking that went really well. I’ve spent the last month or so knowledge sharing and I’m confident that the people who will be taking on the API work from now on will have no problem. I’ll also be doing contract work for Multimap in the near future too so I won’t be completely hands off on it.
The photo above shows my blue badge before I handed it back but I thought it would be amusing to also show an old business card of mine with it. Before I started working for Multimap I actually worked for a Manchester web agency - Fast Web Media. When I started working there they were actually a subsidiary of “FAST Search and Transfer” and were working on a “soccer search engine”. That project was eventually shelved but the company continued doing it’s flagship Premiership football scores and news website and started taking on more client work. Though they were eventually spun out from FAST to be a separate entity, FAST continued to hold the largest single share in the company. Fast forward to now and we find that Microsoft has bought FAST. The sale appears to have gone through so now it seems that Microsoft will now own the largest share of my old company. This is a fact I’m thinking I should highlight to any potential companies that I might work with, every company I work for gets bought by Microsoft!
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State of the Map: Weekend Review
So “State of the Map” is over for another year :-( But it was a really good weekend! The standard of the talks was really high and the organisation of the conference in general was very well handled.
Though Saturday might have seemed to have a slightly more commercial slant (partly due to my own talk) I think in general it didn’t detract from the experience at all. As far as I can remember ITO were the only company launching a product and that product has obvious and immediate benefits to the OSM community. The main other commercial speakers - myself and Ed Freyfogle of Nestoria were talking about our own experiences of trying to use OSM data, and other crowdsourced data, and hopefully the lessons we’ve learned will be valuable for the OSM community.
Apart from this the various “State of _
_" talks were interesting as it's really good to see how various countries are progressing in OSM, and it's good to see how coverage is increasing at a generally rapid pace. I'm just noticing that there was no "State of Great Britain" which is perhaps a little odd. I suppose we assume that everyone knows what it is, when in fact many of the attendees were visiting from foreign countries (they'd have to be or we couldn't have so many "State of _ _" talks!) My favourite had to be the Italy one which featured this video: Apart from this there were also lots of talks about how people were using the data. Unfortunately this year there was no pulsing maps but work is continuing on renderering the data, there’s a number of people aiming to get routing services going with the data, and there was also newer uses such as Wikitravel’s Free World Travel Guides and more active development on uses with mobile devices.
Ed Parsons also talked about Google’s Map Maker, in general covering the same ground as his earlier blog post but offering more reassurances that Google was not out to destroy OSM and would most likely be willing to work with the OSM community in the future. He raised similar concerns on the current OSM CC-BY-SA license to those I made so hopefully we will be able to make a switch to an alternative license before too long.
The new license was mentioned a few times during the weekend but the difficulty of obtaining pro bono legal help has been slowing it down. It’s hoped that a second lawyer may take a look at it in the next week or so. Also Ed and I both expressed interested in getting Google and Multimap to take a look at the license too with a view to the companies using OSM data if the license is suitable. No idea what will become of that though. In Ed’s talk about Map Maker he also listed the countries currently being mapped by Google. The long list of Caribbean countries inspired Gervase Markham to set up an OSM fieldwork pledgebank. The idea is that if 60 people pledge to donate 10 pounds and an hour’s mapping effort then Grenada, and other Caribbean countries, will be mapped in OSM in no time, and hopefully a lucky one of the 60 will get to go to Grenada to do some OSM fieldwork!
Chaitanya has already blogged his weekend review and I thought he summed it up pretty well in his post:
The main reason I see OSM getting viral adoption and growth in the future is the pragmatism within the community. From the founders down everyone is already (only 2-3 years into its existence) asking what do we do now that we have (or very quickly acquiring) data? What applications can we build with this? What do we need to change to make OSM even better, make it a viable data choice for commercial uses ahead of the likes of TA and Navteq etc etc. **Bravo!**
Technorati tags: sotm, sotm2008, sotm08, osm, map, openstreetmap
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State of the Map: Day 1 Review
Not really a review, just thought I’d mention that day one went really well, even without SteveC managing to get there for his keynote. My talk seemed to go ok although I rushed through it and then was told I didn’t have any time for questions as the previous talks had overrun. A few people have grabbed me for questions though which is good. I’ve also published my slides on slideshare.
As I say the day went really well, the theme of the day was “OSM in the real world” which meant that there was a slight commercial slant, but also a number of demonstrations of how people are using the data. This is one of the most important things about OSM, the open availability of the data which I’ve been intending to blog about sometime but not had time.
If you want more information about what was talked about you can take a look at the schedule, some reports here or Chaitanya’s blog where he’s been putting notes for each talk.
Technorati tags: sotm, sotm2008, sotm08, osm, map, openstreetmap
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