Dennis Forbes, a regular poster on the
Joel on Software forum, has an
interesting post about the application of EXIF headers in images and GPS.
You could do a lot of cool things with a library of geo-coded photos.
I sent Dennis a message about two very interesting projects I saw at
CodeCon 2005 that dealt with this topic.
First, there was Mapr, which isn't strictly GPS, but
is a really cool application that works on top of Flickr. It finds
place-named tags and puts them on a map. It's an interesting way to look
at photos.
Second, there was Photospace which
actually used GPS. The guy who wrote it biked around with a GPS taking
photos and then coorelated the data using the timestamps on his photos.
He could then plot the photos on a map, or search for photos within a
certain distance of a zip code and stuff like that. It was VERY cool.
Unfortunately, his demo seems to be down. But you can look at the slides
and download the code.
Pragmatic Programmers has launched a new product line of short (60-100
pages) books which they are calling
Fridays. The first one is
$8.50.
It reminds me of what Philip Greenspun has said about writing. In his
article What can we
learn from Jakob Nielsen? he proposes that computer books are bloated to
meet the pressures of the market, where the biggest spine often wins. He
suggests that many books are expansions of short core ideas up to book
length in order to sell. They would be better as a tight 30-50 pages. And
you could deliver them on the web.
Prickly Paradigm Press is also doing
something similar by publishing old skool pamphlets, like Rick Perlstein's
The Stock Ticker and the
Superjumbo and Thomas Geoghegan's
The Law in Shambles. They
are about 100 pages and cost $10.
This is a promising development in publishing.
There is one problem though -- how do I know if I want to read these
ebooks? I can search for web pages and I don't usually have to pay for
them. I can flip through books at the book store. But these ebooks aren't
free, they're locked up behind paywalls. How do I find them? How do I know
it will answer my question?