Tags: maps

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t enable notifications on my phone. Text messages are the only exception. I don’t want to get notified if a new email arrives (I avoid email on my phone completely) and I certainly don’t want some social media app telling me somebody liked or faved something.

But the number one feature I’d like to see in Safari on iOS is web notifications.

It’s not for me personally, see. It’s because it’s the number one reason why people are choosing not to go all in progressive web apps.

Safari on iOS is the last holdout. But that equates to enough marketshare that many companies feel they can’t treat notifications as a progressive enhancement. While I may not agree with that decision myself, I get it.

When I’m evangelising the benefits of building on the open web instead of making separate iOS and Android apps, I inevitably get asked about notifications. As long as mobile Safari doesn’t support them—even though desktop Safari does—I’m somewhat stumped. There’s no polyfill for this feature other than building an entire native app, which is a bit extreme as polyfills go.

And of course, unlike on your Mac, you don’t have the option of using a different browser on your iPhone. As long as mobile Safari doesn’t support web notifications, nothing on iOS can support web notifications.

I’ve got progressive web apps on the home screen of my phone that match their native equivalents feature-for-feature. Twitter. Instagram. They’re really good. In some ways they’re superior to the native apps; the Twitter website is much calmer, and the Instagram website has no advertising. But if I wanted to get notifications from any of those sites, I’d have to keep the native apps installed just for that one feature.

So in the spirit of complaining about web browsers in a productive way, I just want to throw this plea out there: Apple, please support web notifications in mobile Safari!

The good news is that web notifications on iOS might be on their way. Huzzah!

Alas, we’re reliant on Maximiliano’s detective work to even get a glimpse of a future feature like this. Apple has no public roadmap for Safari. There’s this status page on the Webkit blog but it’s incomplete—web notifications don’t appear at all. In any case, WebKit and Safari aren’t the same thing. The only way of knowing if a feature might be implemented in Safari is if it shows up in Safari Technology Preview, at which point it’s already pretty far along.

So while my number one feature request for mobile Safari is web notifications, a close second would be a public roadmap.

It only seems fair. If Apple devrels are asking us developers what features we’d like to see implemented—as they should!—then shouldn’t those same developers also be treated with enough respect to share a roadmap with them? There’s not much point in us asking for features if, unbeknownst to us, that feature is already being worked on.

But, like I said, my number one request remains: web notifications on iOS …please!

I just finished watching The Billion Dollar Code, a German language miniseries on Netflix. It’s no Halt and Catch Fire, but it combines ’90s nostalgia, early web tech, and an opportunity for me to exercise my German comprehension.

It’s based on a true story, but with amalgamated characters. The plot, which centres around the preparation for a court case, inevitably invites comparison to The Social Network, although this time the viewpoint is from that of the underdogs trying to take on the incumbent. The incumbent is Google. The underdogs are ART+COM, artist-hackers who created the technology later used by Google Earth.

Early on, one of the characters says something about creating a one-to-one model of the whole world. That phrase struck me as familiar…

I remember being at the inaugural Future Of Web Apps conference in London back in 2006. Discussing the talks with friends afterwards, we all got a kick out of the speaker from Google, who happened to be German. His content and delivery was like a wonderfully Stranglovesque mad scientist. I’m sure I remember him saying something like “vee made a vun-to-vun model of the vurld.”

His name was Steffen Meschkat. I liveblogged the talk at the time. Turns out he was indeed on the team at ART+COM when they created Terravision, the technology later appropriated by Google (he ended up working at Google, which doesn’t make for as exciting a story as the TV show).

His 2006 talk was all about Ajax, something he was very familiar with, being on the Google Maps team. The Internet Archive even has a copy of the original audio!

It’s easy to forget now just how much hype there was around Ajax back then. It prompted me to write a book about combining Ajax and progressive enhancement.

These days, no one talks about Ajax. But that’s not because the technology went away. Quite the opposite. The technology became so ubiquituous that it no longer even needs a label.

A web developer today might ask “what’s Ajax?” in the same way that a fish might ask “what’s water?”

Remember when I wrote about adding travel maps to my site at the recent Indie Web Camp Brighton? I must confess that the last line I wrote was an attempt to catch a fish from the river of the lazy web:

It’s a shame that I can’t use the lovely Stamen watercolour tiles for these static maps though.

In the spirit of Cunningham’s Law, I was hoping that somebody was going to respond with “It’s totally possible to use Stamen’s watercolour tiles for static maps, dumbass—look!” (to which my response would have been “thank you very much!”).

Alas, no such response was forthcoming. The hoped-for schooling never forthcame.

Still, I couldn’t quite let go of the idea of using those lovely watercolour maps somewhere on my site. But I had decided that dynamic maps would have been overkill for my archive pages:

Sure, it looked good, but displaying the map required requests for a script, a style sheet, and multiple map tiles.

Then I had a thought. What if I keep the static maps on my archive pages, but make them clickable? Then, on the other end of that link, I can have the dynamic version. In other words, what if I had a separate URL just for the dynamic maps?

These seemed like a good plan to me, so while I was travelling by Eurostar—the only way to travel—back from the lovely city of Antwerp where I had been speaking at Full Stack Europe, I started hacking away on making the dynamic maps even more dynamic. After all, now that they were going to have their own pages, I could go all out with any fancy features I wanted.

I kept coming back to my original goal:

I was looking for something more like the maps in Indiana Jones films—a line drawn from place to place to show the movement over time.

I found a plug-in for Leaflet.js that animates polylines—thanks, Iván! With a bit of wrangling, I was able to get it to animate between the lat/lon points of whichever archive section the map was in. Rather than have it play out automatically, I also added a control so that you can start and stop the animation. While I was at it, I decided to make that “play/pause” button do something else too. Ahem.

If you’d like to see the maps in action, click the “play” button on any of these maps:

• Everything from this August.
• Links from June 2017.
• Photos from October 2014.
• The entirety of 2018—that might take a while.

You get the idea. It’s all very silly really. It’s right up there with the time I made my sparklines playable. But that’s kind of the point. It’s my website so I can do whatever I want with it, no matter how silly.

First of all, the research department for adactio.com (that’s me) came up with the idea. Then that had to be sold in to upper management (that’s me too). A team was spun up to handle design and development (consisting of me and me). Finally, the finished result went live thanks to the tireless efforts of the adactio.com ops group (that would be me). Any feedback should be directed at the marketing department (no idea who that is).

It was Indie Web Camp Brighton on the weekend. After a day of thought-provoking discussions, I thoroughly enjoyed spending the second day tinkering on my website.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to add maps to my monthly archive pages (to accompany the calendar heatmaps I added at a previous Indie Web Camp). Whenever I post anything to my site—a blog post, a note, a link—it’s timestamped and geotagged. I thought it would be fun to expose that in a glanceable way. A map seems like the right medium for that, but I wanted to avoid the obvious route of dropping a load of pins on a map. Instead I was looking for something more like the maps in Indiana Jones films—a line drawn from place to place to show the movement over time.

I talked to Aaron about this and his advice was that a client-side JavaScript embedded map would be the easiest option. But that seemed like overkill to me. This map didn’t need to be pannable or zoomable; just glanceable. So I decided to see if how far I could get with a static map. I timeboxed two hours for it.

After two hours, I admitted defeat.

I was able to find the kind of static maps I wanted from Mapbox—I’m already using them for my check-ins. I could even add a polyline, which is exactly what I wanted. But instead of passing latitude and longitude co-ordinates for the points on the polyline, the docs explain that I needed to provide …cur ominous thunder and lightning… The Encoded Polyline Algorithm Format.

Go to that link. I’ll wait.

Did you read through the eleven steps of instructions? Did you also think it was a piss take?

1. Take the initial signed value.
2. Multiply it by 1e5.
3. Convert that decimal value to binary.
4. Left-shift the binary value one bit.
5. If the original decimal value is negative, invert this encoding.
6. Break the binary value out into 5-bit chunks.
7. Place the 5-bit chunks into reverse order.
8. OR each value with 0x20 if another bit chunk follows.
9. Convert each value to decimal.
10. Add 63 to each value.
11. Convert each value to its ASCII equivalent.

This was way beyond my brain’s pay grade. But surely someone else had written the code I needed? I did some Duck Duck Going and found a piece of PHP code to do the encoding. It didn’t work. I Ducked Ducked and Went some more. I found a different piece of PHP code. That didn’t work either.

At this point, my allotted time was up. If I wanted to have something to demo by the end of the day, I needed to switch gears. So I did.

I used Leaflet.js to create the maps I wanted using client-side JavaScript. Here’s the JavaScript code I wrote.

It waits until the page has finished loading, then it searches for any instances of the h-geo microformat (a way of encoding latitude and longitude coordinates in HTML). If there are three or more, it generates a script element to pull in the Leaflet library, and a corresponding style element. Then it draws the map with the polyline on it. I ended up using Stamen’s beautiful watercolour map tiles.

That’s what I demoed at the end of the day.

But I wasn’t happy with it.

Sure, it looked good, but displaying the map required requests for a script, a style sheet, and multiple map tiles. I made sure that it didn’t hold up the loading of the rest of the page, but it still felt wasteful.

So after Indie Web Camp, I went back to investigate static maps again. This time I did finally manage to find some PHP code for encoding lat/lon coordinates into a polyline that worked. Finally I was able to construct URLs for a static map image that displays a line connecting multiple points with a line.

I’ve put this maps on any of the archive pages that also have calendar heat maps. Some examples:

• Everything from August 2019
• Notes from July 2018
• Links from June 2017
• Photos from October 2014
• Journal entries from December 2012

If you go back much further than that, the maps start to trail off. That’s because I wasn’t geotagging everything from the start.

I’m pretty happy with the final results. It’s certainly far more responsible from a performance point of view. Oh, and I’ve also got the maps inside a picture element so that I can swap out the tiles if you switch to dark mode.

It’s a shame that I can’t use the lovely Stamen watercolour tiles for these static maps though.