News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit
Good news and bad news…
The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!
The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.
Link tags: maps
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Design as (un)ethical illusion
Many, if not all, of our world’s most wicked problems are rooted in the excessive hiding of complexity behind illusions of simplicity—the relentless shielding of messy details in favor of easy-to-use interfaces.
But there’s always a tradeoff between complexity, truth, and control. The more details are hidden, the harder it is to understand how the system actually works. (And the harder it is to control). The map becomes less and less representative of the territory. We often trade completeness and control for simplicity. We’d rather have a map that’s easy to navigate than a map that shows us every single detail about the territory. We’d rather have a simple user interface than an infinitely flexible one that exposes a bunch of switches and settings. We don’t want to have to think too hard. We just want to get where we’re going.
Seamful and seamless design are reframed here as ethical and deceptive design:
Ethical design is like a glove. It obscures the underlying structure (i.e. your hand) but preserves some truth about its shape and how it works. Deceptive design is like a mitten. It obscures the underlying structure and also hides a lot about its shape and how it works.
Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination - Spotlight at Stanford
There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.
Mapping a World of Cities
A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.
Spatial Awareness
Robin Hawkes has made a lovely website to go with his newsletter all about maps and spatial goodies.
geoTrad - Google My Maps
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
getlon.lat
80 geocoding service plans to choose from.
I’m going to squirrel this one away for later—I’ve had to switch geocoding providers in the past, so I have a feeling that this could come in handy.
This Video Has {{ viewcount }} Views - YouTube
Tom’s videos are so good! Did you see his excellent in-depth piece on copyright?
This one is all about APIs and the golden age of Web 2.0 when we were free to create mashups.
It pairs nicely with a piece by another Tom from a couple of years back on the joy of Twitterbots.
Google Maps Hacks, Performance and Installation, 2020 By Simon Weckert
I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.
99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic
Draw all roads in a city at once
A lovely little bit of urban cartography.
Mapping the Moon
A look at all the factors that went into choosing the Apollo landing sites, including this gem:
Famous amateur astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, also produced a hand drawn map of the moon from his own observations using his homemade telescope at his home in Selsey, Sussex. These detailed pen and ink maps of the Moon’s surface were used by NASA as part of their preparations for the moon landing.
The Decolonial Atlas
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Lights at sea
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
First You Make the Maps
How cartography made early modern global trade possible.
Maps and legends. Beautiful!
Atlas of Urban Expansion
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
An Atlas of Cyberspaces- Historical Maps
These diagrams of early networks feel like manuscripts that you’d half expect to be marked with “Here be dragons” at the edges.
No More Google
A list of alternatives to Google’s products.
Barely Maps
Minimalist cartography.
Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou
Procedurally generated medieval town plans. Pick a size and then have some fun with the “warp” option.
The map we need if we want to think about how global living conditions are changing - Our World in Data
While a geographical map is helpful if you want to find your way around the world, a population cartogram is the representation that we need if we want to know where our fellow humans are at home.