I realize it’s been some time so once again I’m pleased to share a fun and hopefully useful 5 Things on Friday.. enjoy and sorry about the delay! ;0) This edition gets a little geeky for our developer friends…
1. Geeky Activities for the Die Hard Geeks at ESRIUC
Developers and Geeks, take note that ESRI has loads of goodies planned for you this year at UC including a Hackathon, OSM Edit-A-Thon, UX Summit and more! Some of the activities for the hard-core hipsters, developers, mashup artists, and geoGeeks include: a hackathon where devs will be challenged to create a cool app or web service using tools provided by Esri; a speed geeking event where you’ll have a chance to hear from 10 geogeeks as they school you on something geeky and new in a matter of minutes; a dev meetup where geeks will convene for beers, appies, and presentations in a fun and informal setting; and a fun, OSM Edit A thon where geeks will be mapping locations to help non-profit social development organizations with their projects in third world countries – See details HERE
2. Mapping GeoJSON Files
It seems that the topic of geoJSON has been trending recently on Twitter, particularly with the GeoHipsters. Bill Dollins (billdollins)has been quite active on the threads and has shared some really interestingresources, like the official blog post on Github on the support for mapping geoJSON files. Dollins also has some nice kudos for @JCSanford in particular for the help he’s received via the pretty sweet resource he has at http://geojsonlint.com/ which enables developers to validate and view their geoJSON in the browser. Finally, those interested in more details should check out the geoJSON spec provided HERE. Oh, and be sure to also have a read on Bill’s blog for extensive post on using GeoJSON from ArcGIS Server – some meaty stuff here!
Source: blog.geomusings.com via Glenn on Pinterest
3. Foursquare Lets Users See Their History – Finally!
I’m a big foursquare user (Well, I used to be anyway!) but it’s always bothered me a bit that I couldn’t really do much with my data and foursquare history. Well, actually I could but it took a fair bit of hacking and mashing and using some cool tools provided by the community, like some fancy GeoRSS, mapping data with GeoCommons and other useful services. Well, foursquare has just rolled out something they call Time Machine that essentially scrapes a users’ checking history to build a social graph and some interesting visualizations – it’s actually quite fun to watch it run! You can run the Foursquare Time Machine HERE and see also some details about it on the Foursquare blog – oh, I wrote up a blog post on it as well!
Source: lbszone.com via Glenn on Pinterest
4. Help the USGS with the National Map Edits in Your Spare Time
Yes indeed, even the USGS can’t resist using the crowd to help clean up data – can you blame them? Here’s something that I find quite clever as the National Map is now enlisting volunteers to help crowd source data and they’ve used a clever game-like reward system as well to reward users who take part in the effort. Similar to how OpenStreetMap (OSM) allows anyone to collect, edit, and use geographic data through an online map editor, the USGS has developed an online editor customized to data to allow volunteers to contribute data to The National Map (http://nationalmap.gov/) and The National Structures Dataset. Details on the National Map Corps volunteer program are found HERE
5. Apple Announces iOS 7 at WWDC
No new devices were rolled out this year at the Apple WWDC so the WOW factor may have been missing, however, a number of new goodies were unveiled for the Apple faithful and perhaps most noteworthy was the official roll-out of iOS7. At R 7, iOS is completely redesigned featuring dynamic text, a sleek UI, better battery life, more controls, better maps, and more. Some noteworthy features of iOS7 include: a new control center, AirDrop for iOS, better multi-tasking, multi-language support for Seri and more! For developers, Apple has released a full transition guide and iOS 7 design help guide (for registered developers so login is required) – See the Guide HERE and see also the official resource from Apple at http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7/
Bonus… Book Suggestion – GeoServer Beginner’s Guide
Something for the developer inside that wants to come out and stard dabbling with GeoServer. The Geoserver Beginner Guide is available as an E book for a mere $25 and users can also take advantage of the complementary title "The Open Layer’s CookBook" for some serious Week-end Reading! Enjoy… See details on both HERE
See the 5 Things on Friday Archive HERE
