12/31/2012

Modern Cartography

What Is Cartography?
Cartography is the art and science of creating maps. It involves the gathering of geographical information, the storage, processing, and editing of this information, and the presentation of the data in map form. Cartography depends on sound geographical knowledge of the surface being mapped, as well as the many skills and tools instrumental to the mapping process.

Early Cartography

Cartography has been practiced since ancient times. For many centuries its highest application was the production of hand-drawn flat maps and charts assembled from information collected visually by explorers, and other individuals. As a result, they were not as accurate as modern maps, but are fascinating as a record of the level of knowledge and thought at the time. Map reproductions were also of great value because they were copied by hand.

NASA App for Android

Still discussing about android. I just found about NASA application for Android and i've downloaded that application a.s.p. This application is very useful to know all the information about satellite, orbit tracking, astronomy such as galaxy, planet, black hole, space phenomena like aurora, etc and NASA itself. If you curious about the information directly from the NASA here it is...


Application Description

The NASA App showcases a huge collection of the latest NASA content, including images, videos on-demand, NASA Television, mission information, news & feature stories, latest tweets, ISS sighting opportunities, satellite tracking, Third Rock Radio and much more. It is available free of charge on Google Play.

12/29/2012

Google Street View on Galaxy Fit

Google Street View is a technology feature on google maps and google earth that provide panoramic view from position along many streets in the world. Google Street View displays panoramas of stitched images taken from a fleet of specially adapted cars. Areas not accessible by car, like pedestrian areas, narrow streets, alleys and ski resorts, are sometimes covered by Google Trikes (tricycles) or snowmobiles. On each of these vehicles there are nine directional cameras for 360° views at a height of about 8.2 feet, or 2.5 meters, GPS units for positioning and three laser range scanners from Sick AG for the measuring of up to 50 meters 180° in the front of the vehicle. These are used for recording a rough 3D model of the surroundings, enabling faux-3D transitions between distinct panoramas where the environment images are momentarily mapped onto this 3D model while being crossfaded to create an animated perspective change as the user travels from one panorama to another. There are also 3G/GSM/Wi-Fi antennas for scanning 3G/GSM and Wi-Fi hotspots. More recently, high quality images have been based on open source hardware cameras from Elphel.

This is the picture shown mobile trikes and pedestrian trikers

Mobile Triker and Pedestrian Trickers

Google Street View was launched on May 25, 2007, in several cities in the United States. Until now there was many area that covered on google street view maps.. we can check here...

Google Street View Map
Google street view is the lastest advanced technology on mapping, using integration among some technology like GPS, Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry which finally produce nice user friendly Geographic Information System (GIS). Google become closer to people around the world by using Mobile GIS on some smartphone like iPhone, Blackberry, and Android. Coupled with Street View facilities, make more interesting. I'm the user of Android Galaxy Fit GT-S5670, then I tried to use it..
Here the screen capture and the video.

Google Street View on Samsung Galacy Fit GT-S5670

First we must download Streew View on Google Play Store, and the install it. Launch the map and search for direction covered based on street view maps. In this case, i choose Paris, France for the search area. The display screen is like picture number 5. Next, we just need zoom in and touch the street/ destination place on the mobile screen for a moment and then pop up button contains street information will appear. Click that button (picture number 6) and we could found street view button at the right side, click it! Holahop! The streetview display is like the last three on picture above this words.

For more detailed information, please refer to the following video...

 




My Metro UI Design

Being dragged to be a General Director of Marketing, Communication and Cooperation at ComInfo BEM-ITS at my last year of college, i got task from my minister directly, to made a design for recruitment poster. Actually i'm being stucked.. i got design block! But, i keep watched what's on laptop's screen, and... finally i got idea..

Metro UI style! yeah..

Metro is an internal code name of a typography-based design language created by Microsoft, originally for use in Windows Phone. A key design principle of Metro is better focus on the content of applications, relying more on typography and less on graphics. Early uses of the Metro principles began as early as Microsoft Encarta 95 and MSN 2.0, and later evolved into Windows Media Center and Zune.Later the principles of Metro were included in Windows Phone, Microsoft's website, the Xbox 360 dashboard update, and Windows 8. (wikipedia.org)

Sometimes my friend said that I'm a freaky windows phone but didn't use to have it! It sounds poor rite? But for now, I think that was the right choice. With minimalistic design concept, i could finished it fast as good as usual. The next reason for choose metro UI style is because i don't have a lot of graphic. With metro UI style we could just focus on the words, needless a lot of pictures.
And the first things i should do... installed corel draw. Yeah, that means, since my laptop was broken, I never even touched that software. Whereas, Corel was still a familliar software for me...haha..
Finally..i make it..although it looks a bit odd..lack of experience! X)

This is the twitter version..
As metro ui style, I just played with typograhy, no more graphics, just logo twitter and facebook. I used Segoe UI for the font.


 This is the caption about how I made the full version!
This is the final, hemm...i'm not really sure..
maybe it would be revised..