Monday, June 26, 2006
Overplot mashes quotes heard in New York
Mihai Parparita, a Google employee, has put together a Google Maps mashup he calls overplot. It mashes together the quotes from Overheard in New York, via the Google Reader feed of the data, with some geocoding via the Google Maps API, so that the quotes can be seen in their appropriate positions on the New York street map.
The technical details include having to use an overlay instead of individual pushpins, since there are so many clustered results to show, and the use of the canvas object to draw areas. Although there is a fallback to ExplorerCanvas to support IE, the code makes no allowances for earlier Mozilla browsers that didn't support the canvas object, which is a shame, since it looks as if this was a late change to improve performance - presumably the earlier code could have been left in place (with reduced performance) to cover a fuller range of browsers.
The technical details include having to use an overlay instead of individual pushpins, since there are so many clustered results to show, and the use of the canvas object to draw areas. Although there is a fallback to ExplorerCanvas to support IE, the code makes no allowances for earlier Mozilla browsers that didn't support the canvas object, which is a shame, since it looks as if this was a late change to improve performance - presumably the earlier code could have been left in place (with reduced performance) to cover a fuller range of browsers.
# posted by zmarties @ 6/26/2006 08:17:00 pm 
