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June 30, 2005

Web Technology

Google Maps API and Greasemap

The Where 2.0 conference I've just been at was quite fun, and inspirational. Among other announcements, Google introduced their new Google Maps APIs. This, plus all the "mashups" that showed hacked versions of Google Maps used in conjunction with other sites, and Tim O'Reilly speaking about "Web 2.0" involving users using open web technologies to "remix" other sites, inspired me to create Greasemap.

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Greasemap is a Greasemonkey-based plugin for Firefox that automatically adds maps to the top of pages containing either geotags (GeoURL or other standards), or regex-recognizable addresses. It works by parsing each page you visit, from Javascript, looking for addresses or other patterns that correspond to locations. If it finds any, it embeds in the page a new toplevel IFRAME at the top, which loads content from www.vinq.com after sending the addresses. This "greasemap.html" web service on Vinq.com attempts to geocode the addresses, then combines them with any lat+long coordinates provided in the page, and embeds one or two Google Maps using the Vinq.com Google Maps API Key (since the iframe comes from Vinq).

I did this more as a proof of concept than anything, though I have already found it useful on sites such as switchboard.com, whitepages.com, and www.apple.com/retail . If a page includes just one address, currently Greasemap shows 2 maps -- a width-limited one at left that is more zoomed out, to show context, and a wider zoomed in one at right.

The Greasemap page lists some of the improvements I plan to make to it, but I also welcome your feedback and suggestions at info@vinq.com

Posted by mark at 09:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 20, 2005

Hobbies

Printed Photo Album with Apple Pages

My father-in-law has impressed our whole family recently with beautifully printed photo album pages he produces on his home color printer. These include attractive captions, background colors + patterns, frames around each photo, and often large page captions or titles. He's producing them on a PC; I'll find out what he's using and add that as an update to this article.

I'm a longtime Mac user, and I find Apple iPhoto to be great for just about everything else about photo management, but for printing these multi-picture-per-page albums, it doesn't really offer a solution. They have a great system for printing books, but require you to pay Apple for the binding and printing.

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Recently when my wife Leslie asked me to finally start printing out some of the many digital photos we've been taking, I searched around for some options. I tried out a program called PhotoPrinto which appears to work reasonably well, but I found the image manipulation tools to be somewhat slow (not as responsive as I'm used to in other Mac applications).

Then I remembered Pages. Pages is part of iWork, a fairly new app from Apple which is positioned as a lightweight word processor for "design-oriented" documents such as family newsletters, flyers, and the like. Interestingly, it offers drag-and-drop support for photos, so you can start with a template that includes a few styled photos, and then drag-drop from iPhoto or any file on disk to replace the photos with new ones. The styles automatically resize to apply to the aspect ratio of the new photo, preserving the longer of the 2 dimensions.

None of the preset templates really worked for our purposes, but I created a new template consisting of 6 different page layouts, each with a mix of sizes of photos. I chose one for the "first page", and left that in existence in the template, while I used "capture pages" to turn each of the others into a Page template as part of my overall "photo album" template.

I then saved this out to /Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/My Templates/ within my home dir, and copied the same to Leslie's mac. After a bit of training and explanation, she was using the pages from this template to create photo album sheets like a pro.

We even found we could browse the web for a site that sold scrapbook background papers, drag a large-sized GIF sample of the paper onto our Pages template, "send to back", then resize it to fill the page behind our photos. After turning down the opacity of that layer, this worked surprisingly well, especially when we print the results as borderless 8.5x11 onto glossy paper, then insert them into plastic sleeves with 3-hole external margins.

I haven't worked it out, but I suspect the cost per page of the Apple books is lower, and the quality just as high, as when I print myself using my expensive Canon i9900 ink + glossy photo paper. But the convenience of being able to design and print at home, with a totally unspecified page layout, is worth the price to me.

If you'd like to try my template, you can click here to download it (533k .tgz), then run "tar xzf photo-album.tgz" from your command line to extract it, and put it into /Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/My Templates/

If you try it, drop me a note to let me know how it works for you: mark@marktorrance.com

Posted by mark at 11:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 13, 2005

Hobbies

Store Wars

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away... I had to blog about this, though I know it's already spread far and wide on the Internet at this point. Store Wars is a hilarious send up of Star Wars, but with the theme of organic vegetables vs. the "empire" of irradiated, chemically enhanced, and factory-processed foods. A great movie with a great message; what more could we want for free? View Store Wars

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Posted by mark at 08:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack