I love calculating driving directions on Google Maps and then drag the blue line marking my directions to change the route. Everything is updated automatically on the page and the directions are re-calculated to go through the new point I defined.

I’ve been playing around with the Google Maps APIs recently and imagine my disappointment when I found out that Google does not allow directions calculated through the APIs to be dragged around.

Not put off by this I decided to try and replicate the directions-dragging myself. How hard can it be?
As it turns out. Very, at least if you want to make it look as smooth as Google’s own solution.

When generating directions Google Maps adds a GPolyline element overlay to your map. You can set the returned line to be editable but this makes an awful lot of vertices appear on it, which makes reading your directions quite hard. Even so, once you dragged one of this vertices around you are not editing the route but just changing the shape of the line.

Mine is not a complete solution and I’m interested in feedback and ideas on how to improve it.

First off calculate your directions:

This will calculate your driving directions and plot a GPolyline on your map. The line is easily accessible in the GDirections object once the directions are calculated. To intercept this I have decided to use the addoverlay event on the GMap object. This event is triggered every time something is plotted over the map (says on the tin).

At this point we can ask the APIs to make the GPolyline editable. This will make the vertices appear on the line and make then draggable. As I said before this only changes the shape of the line and doesn’t actually affect your directions object. Luckily the GPolyline comes with a nifty event called lineupdated.
This is triggered once the user has finished dragging a vertex. By intercepting this we can look through the vertices and know what’s been changed on the line and where the vertex has been moved to.
In order to do this we must also know the previous position of the vertices (latitude and longitude) to be able to compare the old and the new “edited” line.
Another challenge is the fact that the GDirections object can accept only so many waypoints (25 if I’m not wrong). Which means we’ll have to add only the vertex that has changed to the directions and not all of them.

This works quite well but does not look as smooth as Google’s solution.
The problem is that while you are dragging a vertex only that bit of the GPolyline moves and the rest stays in its original position. which makes the shape of your directions quite awkward while you are dragging. Unforunately the GPolyline does not come with a “startdragging” event, otherwise we could just recalculate the route every few seconds while the vertex is being dragged.

This is not the most elegant of solutions but it does the job.

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You may have read recently that Khronos is implementing something called WebGL. The objective of the project is to expose all of OpenGL ES calls to javascript. Thus allowing hardware accellerated 3d graphics within a browser.
Google has also been working on an alternative, called O3D.

Let’s first talk about the technical differencies between the two projects.

O3D and WebGL while both trying to bring accellerated 3D graphics to the web have taken two fairly different courses. As I mentioned in the introduction to this post WebGL’s plan is just to expose to JavaScript OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs. Whereas Google’s solution is based on a browser plugin.

If we think about this we’ll soon realise that WebGL depends entirely on JavaScript. JavaScript, as of today, is a fairly slow language. This point was made in a discussion thread on the O3D project website.

WebGL, being 100% dependent on JavaScript to do an application’s scene graph, is going to have serious problems drawing more than a few pieces of geometry at 60hz except in very special cases or on very fast machines. This means WebGL requires JavaScript to:

*) do all parent-child matrix calculations for a transform graph.

*) all culling calculations (bounding box to frustum or other)

*) all sorting calculations for dealing with transparent objects.

*) all animation calculations.

As an example the kitty demo in O3D is doing linear interpolations on 2710 floats to animate 170 transforms. The point is not that the artist that created the kitty should probably not have used 170 bones. Rather the point is it seems unlikely that JavaScript
will be able to do that anytime soon and if it can then just add more than one kitty to pass its limits.

Also we have to keep in mind that not all hardware supports OpenGL ES.

O3D, By virtue of being a browser plugin written in C++, so an additional (hopefully fast) abstraction layer on top of the GPU, allowed Google to define a new set of APIs to expose to JavaScript and keep us (the JavaScript developers) away from the hardware. O3D will take care of the interaction with either DirectX or OpenGL.

Furthermore Google has open-sourced O3D through its Google Code website. Which means we can all have a look at their code and participate in the project. This resulted in a lot of documentation being available. For a full overview of how O3D works check out the technical overview on the O3D project page.

Do you think that this is the making of a new “Standards war”? Both Google and Khronos are adamant that they are not competing. However I believe that ultimately only one project will come out as a standard. As the complexity of 3D web applications increases it is not feasible to write code for both “APIs”. The only question for me at this point is who will come out on top.

To answer this I would look at the audience of the two projects. OpenGL has been out in the wild for a long while and many developers of videogames, or general graphic application, are already familiar with the APIs and the way it works, therefore it would probably make sense for them to embrace WebGL.
Nonetheless O3D still stands a chance. For a very simple reason. It’s the web we’re talking about.

Frankly I can’t see myself playing a big videogame like fallout in a browser window anytime soon. These APIs will be used to enrich web application. Some examples are already coming out using O3D. Have a look at this Home Designer. Can’t you already see IKEA using it.
My point here is that we’re not likely to see game developers switch to the web. We’re much more likely to see web developers start working on games or application involving 3d graphics, and this is where Google wins.

O3D extends application JavaScript code with an API for 3D graphics. It uses standard JavaScript event processing and callback methods.

As a web developer I can keep writing JavaScript code as I’m used to without having to change the way I think to how a game developer does.

What do you think?

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After much anticipation and hype the Gdrive seems to be on its way, or so the WSJ reports.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on any specific online storage plans beyond what it already offers as part of its email and other services. But she said in a statement that “storage is an important component of making Web [applications] fit easily into consumers’ and business users’ lives.”

Most companies, from small businesses to big giants are moving their environments online to make documentation/presentations or whatever else may be needed available to their employees, wherever they may be whenever they want.

As I said in a previous post Google is pushing its online productivity suite and a shared online storage could definitely give an additional boost to the entire system.
The online storage is one of the few reasons why I use .Mac, the second rationale behind the choice is that the interface is just brilliant, the iDisk is mounted as a file system and directly accessible from my Finder.

In my opinion if Google really wants to make the Gdisk a must have for small/big businesses a client software to access the data is vital – not because it works better, but because it is a step final users have to go through to get used to online storage solutions. Most people don’t, and won’t for a while, use Writely or Google’s new PowerPoint-ish software – they’ll keep creating documents in their local environment and the sensation of accessing a local drive to save their work will make them feel somewhat more secure.

For its office components to attract big businesses Google still has do a great deal of work on the corporate accounts handling side – being able to organize accounts in groups and set different access permissions on a Gdisk’s folders would be a great start.
Another useful additional feature, which as I understand is due sometime soon, is offline availability of the applications. An internet connection is not always available and an entire company can’t just stop working because IT people in the basement are messing around with routers.

Having said that it’s not only functionality-related issues Google has to address but also privacy and security questions. If they want more of our data to be stored on their servers, and with Gdisk it wouldn’t only be images and documents but all sort of data we may not want other people to see, we expect Google to have some pretty satisfactory answers ready – Especially when we’re talking about reserved and potentially vital information its business customers save in the cloud.

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• Buzzmachine – The fight for world domination
• TechCrunch – Why Digg is still the best
• Mashable – Is infringement avoidable?
• The Register – Telling lies to a computer is still lying, rules High Court
• The Motley Fool – A stunted solar stock
• TechCrunch – Q&A with Barack Obama on key technology issues
• Reuters – Oddly Enough – Announcer sacked over spoof messages

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I was invited a few months ago to test the BBC iPlayer. I quite liked the idea and I’m very interested in everything streaming. I also tested Joost and Zattoo.

Unfortunately when the BBC decided to send me the invitation I had a Mac laptop and my computer at home was running Vista, !@”#$. Obviously the player doesn’t work with Mac OS. I wasn’t, however, expecting the application not to work with Vista. When I tried to activate the application I was greeted by an error popup telling me that the system works only with Internet Explorer on Windows XP. Fair enough.

I have now switched back to good old XP and am ready to test this player. Still no Firfox, I opened IE and logged in the BBC site with my beta account. Beautiful web interface, which works fine with Firefox too. After installing the small application an icon appears in the systray which is called: “Your Library”. Say what? I thought all BBC content was part of my library and I just had to click on any video to have it streamed to me instantly.

Apparently not. Opening the “Library” just says: you have nothing. Ok, so back to the BBC website with my newly installed IE plugin. Click on the new episode of Little Britain and right away the site told me that the video was being downloaded. Again, my only reaction is “Say what?”. So back to the library window, which is not even an application but a small popup running the IE engine with the BBC plugin to access your system information. This bright pink window is telling me that a 300 MB video is being downloaded and I had 500 MB of space on my hard drive allocated for the library.

My video is now here, excellent, click on play now. Another small IE-powered popup opens and, disguised under a customized interface, Windows Media Player starts playing the video, a bit slow though, but you can’t expect much from WMP. Oh yeah, almost forgot, my license for the video expires in 3 days then it’s a useless 300 MB file.

Now I don’t pretend to know any better than the BBC people working on this. They must have thought it through quite thoroughly. I do have a few questions though.

1. Only windows XP and IE? Ever heard of flash? YouTube? Anybody? How about Mac users? Linux? Vista?
2. Download a 300 MB file that I have to trash after 3 days? Planning to save on your Bandwidth anytime soon?
3. Ever heard of streaming using P2P technology to save aforementioned bandwidth and offer more content? Seriously you should check out Joost, they started developing their application before you did.

Please, please have a look at Joost. Multi-platform, more content and less bandwidth usage because we stream to each other using BitTorrent‘s P2P technology. Maybe Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström will take pity on you and give you a small channel on their platform to share your content, if you ask nicely.

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I recently came across FaveBot. The site aims at aggregating and filtering RSS feeds from the most renowned news sites and blogs all over the internet and has recently received a major update functionality-wise.

The site doesn’t exactly look beautiful but its minimalistic simple interface makes it incredibly easy to use.
Once the really brief signup process is completed you are all set to go. Through the “My Trackings” tab you’ll be able to specify search keywords and the categories of feeds you want the site to search in. Results are immediately accessible from the “MyDiscoveries” section.
The categories currently available on the site are blogs, books, DVDs, events, music, news, photos, podcasts and videos.

Another spiffy functionality is the possibility to upload your iTunes library file and let the site aggregate for you all relevant news about your favorite bands.

The only thing I find quite confusing is the fact that while you’re allowed to create multiple tracking filters the results are then all mashed together. the only way to access the outcome of a single search is to click on the number of results in the Trackings summary page.
The site would, perhaps, grow at a considerably faster pace by letting its users add new fees to its database. At the moment the list of feeds to be spidered seems to be “hard-coded”.

The idea looks solid and fairly useful. With just a few fixes and usability improvements it could probably turn into a profitable business in its niche between Feedburner and Digg.

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Last month Valleywag reported that Facebook employees are allowed to see all members’ profile, even if set as private, through a super-user access, which already raises some privacy questions. Apparently the social network has now taken its loose privacy policy one step further.

A poster on the AR-15 Forums, a firearms-enthusiasts website, says her bosses asked Facebook for permission to see her profile – which was set to private – needless to say Facebook docilely complied.
Facebook privacy policy clearly states that they might share your profile if asked by law enforcement or a private litigant armed with a court order.

We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.

Now from what I’ve heard this woman’s boss had no court order or any real reasons to ask for access to his employee’s profile. Said profile apparently contained some photos of the woman holding firearm, which she legally detained and acquired during her own time.

This really is worrying. Facebook clearly wanted to avoid lawsuits or any legal problem which may ensue but I feel this is hardly good for its “interests or property”. Such a Chinese-ish data sharing policy is certainly not something Facebook’s users want to deal with or be worried about.

Tthis is a big hit for the entire social-networks category. Certainly before joining the next hip community I’ll make sure to read its privacy policy carefully and that it will treat its customers data gingerly.

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Being somewhat involved in the financial markets myself I find this video brilliant and particularly realistic. Especially the joke about emotions-induced volatility.
This is particularly true for who like me trades in Chinese equities which have been made even more volatile but the strong belief everyone involved in the market holds that China is a bloated time bomb about to explode.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_qK4g6ntM&rel=1&border=0]

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Google takes yet another step in its battle against Microsoft for domination of the corporate environment.

The software giant has recently released a set of APIs which will make migration from a Microsoft/any-other-system-you-may-use to Gmail incredibly simple.

“We’ve provided developer documentation and sample code that allows developers to build extremely sophisticated mail migration tools, some of which can be run by administrators to migrate centralized mail and some of which can be run by end-users to migrate mail from the desktop,” — Gabe Cohen, Google Apps product manager.

I couldn’t find any data about the usage of Google documents around. I expect the uptake of the application to be extremely high among non-corporate users. However, It seems that it will take a bit longer for small businesses and startups to get used to the service and start using it. Especially considering that most users have been educated in a Microsoft-ruled environment their entire professional life.

Google had previously released another set of tools to allow users and system administrators to migrate from most IMAP-based e-mail systems to Google Gmail.

Furthermore, as much as this set of APIs is a very interesting development, I hardly see a big corporation spending a considerable amount of dough and development time to migrate its entire system, similarly it’s going to be even harder for small business find the time and money to dedicate to this. Don’t take me to seriously now though. Companies like Capgemini, with 80,000 employees are in fact putting a first toe in the water and using Google Apps for some of its employees.

Nevertheless I’m sure all sort of open-source/free applications will sprout all over the internet to let disgruntled Outlook users switch to Gmail.

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The Funded, a controversial website which lets entrepreneurs rate VCs performances and behavior, has pulled off a major PR stunt 2 days ago when the mind behind the project revealed himself to the press.
Unfortunately the entire thing didn’t exactly work out as planned as information leaked to the press/blogs well before the scheduled announcement time. TechCrunch and GigaOm among others were already reporting the name of The Man behind it hours ahead of the official announcement.

The man, “Ted”, behind “The Funded” is Adeo Ressi. Ressi founded and sold casual gaming site Game Trust to RealNetworks this September for around $20 million. He also serves on the board of the X Prize Foundation, best known by their cash prize for civilian space exploration.

Not only entrepreneurs but also VCs can create a profile on the site and set the story straight – or rather, tell their side of it.
Oddly enough The Funded is not venture backed.

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