Wanna make your own Google Maps style viewer for massive images? Checkout Pan & Scan. I'm currently trying to build a draggable electronic programme guide interface, and this has given me loads of ideas....
Principally that rather than relying on widths and floats, I need to absolutely position everything to make it work - this is because a) you can't reliably apply heights and widths to inline elements (and inline-block in css is not properly supported), b) floats will always wrap inside a div with overflow:hidden set and c) if you want an infinitely draggable surface, you need to go back in time as well as forward, and absolute positioning is the only way to position things at minus (-ve) positions i.e. earlier than the on-load view.
Thanks Michal Migurski!
GSV: Pan & Scan
Freesat is nearly here
So the TV aerial on my new house is rubbish. Watching Eastenders which freezes every 3 seconds is more annoying than watching the real thing. I invited a company to come round and take a look. Even thought I'd told them the aerial was on the 4th floor, they still turned up, told me it was 'too high' and that I now needed to pay them a £30 callout charge. If I really wanted them to fix it, it'll be £280 - and that I might consider Freesat from Sky. On commission I wonder?
I'd already beaten them to it on this one. Freesat from Sky just needs a sky box, dish, and a £20 card you can order from Sky, and that's it. I didn't have a sky dish, so I brought one off Ebay and fitted it myself. Seriously, it was easy. Thing is, Freesat from Sky is rubbish.
You only get a small subset of the freeview channels (no Dave, E4 or More4) plus lots of rubbish, and worst of all, you can't customise the EPG to only show the 10 channels you can get worth watching.
Help is nearly at hand. Aware that Freesat from Sky is rubbish, some broadcasters including the BBC and ITV have got together in a freeview-style consortium to develop their own free satellite platform called, you guessed it, Freesat.
Now Freesat looks really promising. Firstly, as their not ties to now-ancient BSkyB hardware, they can inist every box is up to date. The big news is that ALL boxes will be HD-compatible - so its going to be the quickest and cheapest way to get BBC, ITV and eventually C4 HD services. No Subscription. Very quickly, there will be boxes with Broadband connectivity, Hard Drives and more - and when you have the bandwidth of a satellite feed, storage of a hard drive, and back-channel of the Internet, you have the single best home entertainment platform on the market - its going to rock.
We've already been doing a lot of work at the BBC about what we can do on this platform, and we're really excited about it.
Now we have to sit tight until the Spring when it launches. I for one will be getting a Freesat box to replace my crappy Sky box - even though it'll have to sit next to my Virgin V+ box. For now that is.....
Google Earth Flight Simulator
So if Google Earth wasn't good enough, they then released Google Sky. But they got bored of that, and now, hidden away inside the latest version of Google Earth is an awesome flight simulator. No, seriously, they're just taking the p*** now.
Its well worth trying out. Download Google Earth, install it, and when its up and running hit Option + Apple + A on a mac, or Ctrl+Alt+A on a PC.
And let the magic begin....