Google Earth comes to spt

33 days ago

Thanks to an alert from Bruce that the GE plugin was now in the wild for Mac – I installed it – and it works fine in iCab

Therefore, I’ve updated my Map script (see GE Developer’s Guide) and there is a new Earth button, however, there is a positional error in my markers:


 

I’ll figure it out when I’ve got a bit more time… which I’ve now had and in the light of a New Year – I’ve simplified my site somewhat – map links now go out to Google Maps.

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iCab 4.2.0

120 days ago

Anyone who has thumbed through these pages will know that my default browser has been iCab since it adopted webkit for it’s engine. Version 4.2.0 has just landed.

Alexander Clauss has been very responsive (I should think not only to me) about suggestions and requests – even adopting our GeoTagIcon when implementing iCab’s geo-detection – which now extends to Flickr’s tricky proprietary internal solution of geotagging photos.

The list of features is extensive and I won’t copy/paste his present version history here, take the time to explore it yourself. But, there are features here that many are perhaps unaware of (or think are the preserve of Firefox or Opera) which when added to the rendering capabilities of webkit, make for one smart browser.

One item that I have been looking forward to in particular, and which has really led me to remark upon this release, is that now iCab’s own “field-based” form fill out feature (second tab in the Forms Manager window) can now be activated automatically when a web page has finished loading, working in a similar way to Safari. So it’s no longer necessary to select the menu item Fill out forms, which has been an oft mentioned criticism and has irked me at times.

I have to apologise to the icon designers, Michael Ludwig and Daniel Beardsmore, I still substitute my own, but that’s a personal thing

Lastly, don’t forget about the experimental settings accessed by entering settings: in the url field – they may never make it to another release – unless that is, you particularly like one and annoy the hell out of Alexander about it. I know I have

Interesting comparison now Shiretoko has arrived with the new Gecko engine:

iCab
CSS Selectors 578/578
Sunspider 4294.2ms
Acid3 75/100

iCabWK
CSS Selectors 578/578
Sunspider Crash
Acid3 100/100

Webkit r36283
CSS Selectors 578/578
Sunspider 1735.2ms
Acid3 100/100

Firefox
CSS Selectors 373/578
Sunspider 3889.6ms
Acid3 71/100

Shiretoko
CSS Selectors 578/578
Sunspider 3561.2ms
Acid3 85/100

Opera 9.52
CSS Selectors 578/578
Sunspider 7468.4ms
Acid3 84/100

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Friars Head

167 days ago

I was having so much fun with Bruce’s logger (!) that I took it on one of my daily Rufus walks around Friars Head land.

The photos are all taken on my iPhone and here is a screenshot of the route as provided by the Holux logger output:

When matched with the photos using GeoTag again and uploaded to Picasa – the photos are plotted on Google Maps. (The side thumbnail link launches the slideshow viewer, but from there you can go to the map overview and there is a ink for the Google Earth kml file.)

Think I’ll keep the logger for the weekend – off to Glyndebourne (Carmen) – promise I’ll send it back after that Bruce, honest

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Holux

169 days ago

Bruce appeared from the internet, along with his better half Simone, and equipped me with a Holux M-241 logger for our little jaunt around Malham Cove on Sunday.

 

Up till now my GeoTagging has been by finding positions on Google Maps by either MapMaker or dragging images onto a Google map within Picasa, which also gives you the chance to save a kml file for Google Earth, but the chance to automatically log the positions of my photos was not to be missed.

Bruce has left the Holux with me for a short while and so for the purposes of having a bit of fun, I also set out on my daily Rufus walk yesterday, with logger on-board and my iPhone.

To get all this logged data actually embedded in the photos, I will be using an open source Java application called GeoTag by Andreas Schneider, which runs on a Mac, but only if you have 64-bit Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.5 – it needs Java SE 6 runtime. (Following on from our GeoTagIcon exploits, Bruce, Frank and I were asked to come up with an icon for this.)

Note: This GeoTag application is launched (in Mac OSX) usually from the geotag.jnlp file, which resides within the GeoTag folder – being a java application you don’t get the normally compiled application – and you will see com.sun.javaws.Main in the Menu Bar, instead of the more usual application title. In some of my screen shots, you may see GeoTag in the menu bar – this is because I’m running it as an application proper from a test file that Andreas sent me – this method of building the application has so far not been able to be replicated with the downloads you get from the GeoTag site.

BT747

Before you begin with GeoTag however, you will have to get the log out of the Holux; for this see Bruce’s work-through and this How-To don’t forget to use the latest BT747 (I initially ran into trouble by using an older version). The transfer worked just fine over Bluetooth and the Holux’s single AA battery did both outings and data transfers.

GeoTag

Using the GeoTag application is actually very straightforward and there is a very useful and pertinent What next? under the Help menu:

You will now have a panel full of image data which displays the selected image below and a hover-over image.

 

Map

I dumped the whole lot across to the map (which comes-up in your default browser) and now we see the general accuracy, and the fact that due to my lack-of-knowledge in using the Holux, both days tracks are displayed with a time link between the two.

Now, I have (I think) a time related problem with the iPhones’s photographs, so they’re all stacked just before I set out. I have tried to alter the photographs time setting in GeoTag, but I can’t seem to be able to alter that – the time-offset yes – but not the photos time. So, it’s been a manual reposition here.

There seemed to be quite a variance of positional error, one of the largest was this example (before and after correction):

However, it is easy to move markers and easy to identify them (see popup image window shot below) – within your default browser window – once moved by click hold and drop, they are automatically updated within GeoTag.

Direction

There is a nice feature whereby you can show the direction that your photo was taken in. I was hoping to see this materialise in some way within Google Earth after export as a kml file, but that export seems to be a little disappointing in that none of the images actually show automatically in GE, they have to be selected form the side list and only display individually.

and on the map you drag the Camera icon to show direction:

Saving

When you are happy with the positions – but, be careful, once saved, they cannot be undone – you have to delete that entry and import the original image again and load the track for it. (Slightly annoying that the finder is more Windows orientated and does not have an image preview to identify it by – especially if your images are fresh from the camera and just a number string.)

To check the images have taken the geo data, open in Preview and show the Inspector from Tools menu, or simply open in iCab – if you have it.

KML

I couldn’t get the Google Earth > Show in Google Earth link to work and as I said before, I was disappointed with the output of the saved kml file;

so, I’ve prepared the same using Picasa and saved that kml file for comparison. Interestingly, the Winterburn Wood photos automatically got attached to the Google Map in uploading to Picasa, whereas the Malham Cove ones didn’t – must have inadvertently altered a setting somehow(?)

Malham Cove

kml Malham Cove.kml kml Malham Cove Picasa.kml

Winterburn Wood

kml Winterburn Wood.kml kml Winteburn Wood Picasa.kml

It’s very useful being able to log your photos and have them geotagged so easily and I will be acquiring some kind of logger/GPS device soon, but I think with my up and coming requirements – I’ll be going for something like the Garmin GPSMAP 495 – thanks for the loan of the Holux Bruce, I promise to return it soon!

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iCabYouTube

206 days ago

As it was about the only thing (at the moment) I could think of realistically using the Stand-Alone Web Application from iCab for is YouTube – I made a little Application icon for it (click on it to download):

When downloaded, rename it AppIcon.icns and put it in the YouTube application Resources folder (remember, right-click on the YouTube app and select Show Package Contents to navigate to the Resources folder).

Edit: Screen-shot of Stand-alone Preferences – re comments.

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iCab 53

208 days ago

Alexander Clauss has done it again with ß53 and brought Fluid (amongst other improvements) to iCab.

When saving a web page it’s now also possible to save the web page as “stand-alone WebApplication“. This creates a real Universal Binary application for this web page. Technically the new application is an iCab browser where many features and GUI elements are removed, which will only display this web site.

I’ve found this type of thing useful for YouTube and Gmail etc., Alexander suggests it would be useful for all the Web Applications like “Google Documents” or the new “me.com” Web Application from Apple which look like normal Desktop applications.

These “stand-alone WebApplication” sites can be used like ordinary desktop applications, they have their own icon, they can be placed in the Dock, and they have their own private preferences, cookies, history etc. The problem I’ve found is that the generated icon is not the quality of a usual desktop icon, in this screen-shot you can see the .Mac and YouTube icons I made next the one automatically generated for Google Documents:

It seems to be a common trend that these WebApplications like “google documents” and as we have seen previewd “me.com” use their own buttons, Drag&Drop and self-contained AJAX, instead of following normal links. Therefore, the URL field, the forward/back buttons often aren’t of much use anymore, so by default the iCab browser toolbar is switched off.

In the process of saving a site as “stand-alone WebApplication”, you can enter the start page and filter which URL the application is allowed to access. Both these settings are automatically filled out by iCab, so usually these don’t need to be changed. This just leaves you to select your GUI language for the “stand-alone WebApplication”. One language must be activated and selecting more than one just uses more disc space.

As I said, there are other improvements with this release, but the only other one I will mention here is the Cache Browser.

Now available in the “Tools” menu, the Cache Browser (only available under MacOSX 10.5 and later) window displays a list of all files that are stored in the web cache. It is possible to filter out certain items by activating/deactivating the file type buttons or by entering some text. There is a preview available for all files, but this is a bit flakey and sometimes produced a crash before an image appeared. However, it is possible though, to use the contextual menu to save the files to disk/open it in a new window etc. Good stuff

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iCab beta 49

229 days ago

Little report about the latest iCab ß49 release.

It now supports GeoTags in a bigger way, extract from the release notes:

Exif data for images:

Also iCab now seems happier when run on webkit nightlies, in fact so much so that it achieved a perfect score in the Acid3 Test (see the Running on Webkit page) and actually beat the webkit it was running-on in the Sunspider javascript speed test.

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Winterburn Fox

542 days ago

Set on one of my regular walks, this little copse at the bend in the river is a favourite place to see the usual river suspects, plus badgers, foxes, buzzards and heron. Sadly, it’s a long time since there’s been Dipper about, but the Kingfishers can occasionally be seen flashing by. (Exhibited at NEWA 2007 – Alkyd on canvas.)

I’m now trying a PixelPost site section (link ‘spoor’) to post some of the thousands of photographs I’ve amassed over the years – some of them may even be worth looking at! I will add a few photos as and when I get around to it – to try it out – but most of my general ones are still on Flickr.

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Snow and Saiga

660 days ago

It’s been blowing blizzards through all day here, following on from the wet of recent days, not good for the newly born lambs that are popping out now. On a nearby relation’s farm, they’ve had quintuplets.

The site is pretty well up and running again, now all written using TextPattern but it actually started out as an uberdose Wordress theme called Zero – just found it easier to create the extra pages and features needed in TxP.

Anyway, enough of that. I heard about another new animal today that is on the verge of extinction, the Saiga. Yes, I know there are probably literally millions of species that I haven’t heard of (and some even that nobody knows of) that are on the verge of extinction, but this little fella is actually a reasonable size – big enough to eat in fact – and that’s been half his problem.

Apparently there had been protection of little known species by the old USSR, but since it’s collapse this protection ended and the combined ills of poverty and demand for Saiga horn in traditional Chinese medicine, has led to the state it finds itself in now having suffered a 96% crash in it’s population.

Not the prettiest of creatures you may say, reminds me of some alien types from films (I’m sure they get their inspiration from nature, I know H.R. Gieger does) with this specially adapted flexible nose to filter dust in summer and warm air in winter. However, just because it doesn’t have the high profile ‘pull’ of Lion or Elephant, is not to say that it doesn’t have an important part to lay within it’s ecosystem and contribution to the wealth of the natural world.

Many creatures are in danger of slipping though the net and away from us altogether and that’s why I support the FFI – where I heard about the Saiga – as they champion equally unglamorous or obscure species in accordance with the Convention on Biological Diversity. I think he deserves a bit of help.

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