I had the idea to build a small display that I can put in my kitchen that will tell me the status of the lines on the London Underground. Obviously there are lots of iPhone apps that do this but I like the idea of having a physical sign that I can look at just before I leave the house on a morning....]]> http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/tflduino/feed/ 0 http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/custom-map-with-route-finding-and-no-api-calls/ http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/custom-map-with-route-finding-and-no-api-calls/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:55:12 +0000 admin http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/?p=766 20th February 2012

Recently I was tasked with building a custom skinned map that would allow the user to drag their mouse and would then snap to the roads and animate their route. This sort of thing is relatively straight forwards when using a mapping API such as Google maps but we wanted to have complete control of how the map looked and also didn't want to have to rely on a third-party web service. In order for custom graphics to be drawn every time the user's mouse rolled over a junction, we would have to make lots of calls to google maps and this simply would not be fast enough.]]> http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/custom-map-with-route-finding-and-no-api-calls/feed/ 0 http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/animating-in-html5/ http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/animating-in-html5/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:09:57 +0000 admin http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/?p=748 http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/animating-in-html5/feed/ 0 http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/visualizing-twitter-in-processing/ http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/visualizing-twitter-in-processing/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:45:04 +0000 admin http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/?p=727 2nd January 2012

Over the Christmas break I've been working on some simple data visualisation using my Twitter data and Processing......]]> http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/visualizing-twitter-in-processing/feed/ 0 http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/quick-processing-js-post-and-toxiclibs-js/ http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/post/quick-processing-js-post-and-toxiclibs-js/#comments Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:06:27 +0000 admin http://www.alistaircolling.co.uk/?p=714 20th November 2011

I've been doing a bit of Processing over the last year and went on a course at the V&A museum led by Karsten Schmidt who is one of the most inspirational creative artists/programmers I have come across. I've been meaning to post some of my sketches but will get around to that soon. I hadn't explored procesing.js at all as I really like coding in Eclipse and using Java with toxiclibs but when I discovered that Kyle Phillips had ported Karsten's toxiclibs library to javascript I was very excited (thanks Jer!).

Recently I created a project in Flex that needed to be deployed on Eyeblaster. Although Eyeblaster are soon to be offering Flex support this isn't something that's currently available and at the time I had to find a quick solution. Hopefully this might be useful to someone else who finds themselves in this obscure situation!

I recently completed a mapping project that had to be completely skinnable with custom tiles, markers and controls. After spending some time researching I decided to use UMap from AFC Components as this is a really flexible mapping component that is great to customise. The purpose of this post is to give an overview of some of the techniques I used to create a totally customised map.