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Metacarta or Similar API QC PluginThis idea being that one could enter in a string to an object that would extract latitude and longitude info, and then return a structure that has the detected location name(s) and coordinates. It would be interesting to be able to have some objects in QC to faciliate the kind of data visualization that this fellow is doing in processing: http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/just-landed-processing-twitter-metaca... This really seems like a natural thing for Quartz Composer.
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Have you seen this composition by @photonal? http://kineme.net/forum/Applications/AudioVisualizations/Nightclubbing
Also, I think there are some NI plugins that do Lat/Long stuff, although it would be very nice to have a plugin that "just worked", similarly to what you linked.
@cwright helped me forever ago with some Lat/Long stuff but it always seemed just a little "off". It worked much better on mercator projection than anything else, but there was still a little bit of error.
Not exactly what you want, but somewhat of a start nonetheless.
Neither of those things are quite what I'm getting at, because the aspect of "it" that's missing for QC is the ability to take data from the web, search through string data and successfully match it against a library of known locations, and then return coordinates.
We can parse through a string, and search web, but there's no real way to get QC to go AHA! when there is a word or words that describe a location, let alone directly return coordinate info.
Even if this isn't the library to use for something like this, I would sincerely LOVE to see something like this available. QC is just SO fitting for presenting info from the web in various cool ways, but right now the ability to sift through it and then produce useful structures to do_cool_stuff is severely limited.
For an idea WAY in the future for QC, it would be great if once you visualize your results, if one could be able to have an interaction event that opens up say, Safari, to search Google Maps to view that Long/Lat data, once you click on the visualized point in QC... that's a digression, but I'm just explaining where I would see stuff like this going an OS version or two down the line, so that QC can actually do a wider variety of useful things.
Ah, I see what you're saying now. I think we could fake it to a moderate amount though (at least for this specific example), there would just have to be a lot loaded in on the front end of QC. I could see a sqlite DB loaded up with this sort of information, but it wouldn't be very dynamic.
I can do some similar stuff on a more limited scale with Microsoft SharePoint and QC using SOAP or a simple HTTP GET request (specially crafted for specific data of course). It's not terribly dynamic though, unless I map out every eventuality that a user might want to pull. So again, a fairly rigid method.
I'm not even sure where QC would begin for something like this, probably several plugins working in concert together to pull this off.
http://github.com/petewarden/openheatmap/ http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/07/want-a-map-of-your-t...
Pete Warden has built a tools using a project called openheatmap that does similar activities to the type of web=> map visualization stuff I was talking about with metacarta.
openheatmapis php+actionscript, so it would take a rewrite to integrate well with QC.http://mapnik.org/ looks like it could be useful in rendering OSM data inside QC.
wow, just realized php isn't trivially embeddable. what year is this? (holy cow, what's with scripting languages not lending themselves to trivial integration/embedding within other apps?)
Seriously. That REXX interpreter we embedded back in 1997 was better-encapsulated than any 'modern' scripting language I've seen..
[Speaking of REXX... I like that it has an explicit
do foreverloop construct.]lua's nice, JavaScriptCore is nice (they both apparently have "contexts" and "interfaces" where you can, like, execute a script without interfering with other scripts in the app, and, like, get data into and out of the script with minimal treachery -- both revolutionary concepts that predate digital computing by centuries).
Python's a joke (still), and ruby could be cool, but I haven't had time to look at it closer to know for sure (and it's GC-only, which precludes it from QC editor unfortunately)
php doesn't even have a library (!) from what I can tell. who overlooked that? (I'm starting to notice that all kinds of cool-technology-developers think their technology is going to be so awesome that it will be "the top", as in, everything will be subservient to it, so it doesn't need to embed/encapsulate well... it's sad. (QC's kinda like that in some ways, sadly)).
One of my very best friends has been using Ruby since highschool... I tried to get him into QC, but I think that the lack of support for Ruby and the fact that javascript was the main scripting language made him totally balk. I think he did a rotating cube demo and moved on ;-)
Good point about the language used for this. It's something that always runs across my mind. The idea of a globe with points and nice linking curve lines, or even a 2D representation would be nice for QC. I like the idea of visualization of internet data in spacial form.