Gary Gale

Posts tagged as "teddington"

Map Wars; Are Apple's Maps Really That Bad?

Making a map isn't easy. Making a map of streets and land features is hard. Making a map of streets and land features that stays up to date is harder. Making a map of streets, features and places, businesses, services, points of interest is harder still. Making a map of all of the previous that stays up to date is really hard. Making a map with all of the previous, wrapping it up in an app that runs on your smartphone and making it useable is verging on insanely difficult. Yet that's what Google and Nokia have been doing and with the release of iOS 6, that's what Apple is now doing as well. So how is Apple doing?

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The Map Of The World According To The London Underground

Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another map of the London Tube system. But wait ... something's not quite right.

Surely the Piccadilly Line ends at Uxbridge, Heathrow Airport and Cockfosters and not at Seattle, Buenos Aires and St. Petersburg? Doesn't the Northern Line run from Edgeware and High Barnet to Morden and not from Helsinki to Mumbai?

Maybe if the London Underground did take over the world, including 3 tunnels across the Atlantic Ocean, this is what the Tube Map might look like.

World Metro Map by Mark Ovenden

Photo Credits: Annie Mole on Flickr.

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Maps, Maps And MOAR Maps At The Society Of Cartographers And Expedia

Updated September 13th. 2012 with embedded YouTube video.

Wednesday September 5th. 2012 was a day of maps. To be precise, it was a day of maps, maps and MOAR maps. Two events, two talks, back to back. Packed choc-a-bloc full of maps. I also cheated slightly.

Firstly there was the International Cartographical Association's first session of the newly formed Commission on Neocartography. Cartography, neocartography, maps; what is there not to like? I'd previously spoken at the UK's Society of Cartographer's annual conference so it was great to be asked by Steve Chilton, SoC and Neocartography chair, to speak at the Neocartography Commission.

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A Map Of The World In One Million Lego Bricks

Imagine for one moment that someone gave you in excess of a million lego bricks and four thousand lego building plates. Imagine also that you had around three week's worth of spare time.

What would you build?

To my mind, the first thing that should spring to mind is a massive map of the world. You've got enough bricks so making a map around 12 by 5 meters should do the trick.

A 1 Million Piece Lego Map Of The World.

Oddly enough, that's exactly what members of the public did on London's Southbank during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Looking From San Francisco To London. In Lego.

If you want to see it for yourself, head over to the terraces outside the Royal Festival Hall but you'll have to hurry. The map will only be around until August 26th.

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Foursquare Checkins, Maps And WordPress; Now With MOAR Maps

If you're an avid Foursquare user you can already display your last checkin, visualised on a map, in the sidebar of your WordPress powered site with the WP Quadratum plugin. Foursquare, checkins and maps ... what more could you ask for? Maybe the answer is more maps.

Version 1.1 of the WP Quadratum plugin, which went live this morning, now has added maps. The previous versions of the plugin used Nokia's maps, because I work for Nokia's Location & Commerce group and I wanted to use the maps that I work on. But if Nokia's maps aren't the maps for you then how about Google's, or maybe CloudMade's OpenStreetMap maps or perhaps OpenLayers' OpenStreetMap maps.

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When The Olympics Came To Teddington

Yes, it was difficult if not impossible to get tickets. Yes, it's overly political. Yes, LOCOG has been overly aggressive in protecting its idea of what the Olympic brand is and in supposedly protecting the interests of the sponsors. Yes, it absolutely sucks that you can only use a Visa card to pay for anything Olympic related.

But also yes, the opening ceremony was amazing. And yes, my home town in the suburbs of London is slap bang in the middle of the cycling road race events.

Generic Photo Shot

And yes, when the Olympics came to Teddington, right to the end of the road where I live, it was utterly and truly amazing. For once, the overused cliche of "once in a lifetime experience" seems utterly apt.

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Where You Are Isn't That Interesting But Where You Will Be Is

Every once in a while the thorny topic of location privacy rears its ugly head, often in tandem with a new location based service or the discovery of what an existing one is really doing. There's often cries of "Big Brother" and "company X is tracking me" as well. But lost in the rhetoric and hyperbole around this subject is a well hidden fact ... your current location isn't actually that interesting to anyone apart from yourself.

For most of the day we tend to be on the move so even if a service does know your location that fact becomes irrelevant almost immediately. Intrusive location based advertising is normally held up for inspection here but without context a location is just a set of longitude and latitude coordinates, coordinates that are out of date and no longer relevant almost as soon as they've been detected.

Maybe a location based service I use does want to target me with location based ads, but for example, if I'm on my irregular commute from the suburbs to the centre of London on a train, I challenge anyone to find an ad, intrusive or not, that would be contextually relevant to me in sufficient detail that would warrant an advertiser paying out the not insignificant sums that such ad campaigns cost. Unless maybe, just maybe, it's an ad that offers me a viable alternative to SouthWestTrain's execrable and expensive train service, but that's just in the realms of fantasy.

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Of CSS, Pointers, Archive Pages and Meta Boxes; WP Biographia Reaches v3.2

WP Biographia v3.2 got pushed to the WordPress plugin repository this afternoon. In the grand scheme of things it's not a massive release but it goes a long way to solving some of the most frequently asked questions that arrive in my Inbox and via the plugin's support forums.

As I've mentioned a few times in the past, it's nigh on impossible to test a WordPress plugin against the myriad combinations of themes and plugins that exist in the WordPress ecosystem. Especially where CSS is concerned, plugins and themes frequently don't play well together and bleed over from another theme or plugin's CSS often makes WP Biographia's formatting look ... interesting. This tends to happen in two places. Firstly in the formatting of the contact links in the Biography Box and secondly in the positioning of the user's avatar image.

Wp Biographia v3.2 provides two workarounds for this. The plugin's CSS now uses the !important CSS specifier to ensure the CSS is applied as it should be in as many cases as is possible.

But sometimes this isn't enough to fix formatting issues, especially if the plugin's the_content filter priority has been dropped below the default value of 10, to get the Biography Box to appear in the right order with the output of other plugins. In this case, the WordPress wpautop filter, which automagically adds paragraph tags, runs after the Biography Box is produced. In this situation you can now tell the plugin to synchronise the wpautop filter to run after the Biography Box is produced.

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Don't Go There, Go Here; A WordPress Redirection Plugin

Despite having written 5 plugins for WordPress I've only just scratched the surface of what it's possible to make WordPress do. So when I want to make WordPress do something that I'm not sure a) how to do and b) whether it's even possible or not, I turn to a search engine. More often than not I get an answer. Often that answer seems to start along the lines of

put the following code in your theme's functions.php file

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