James Williams' Blog

According to a recent post on Techcrunch, Google is opening up access to Map Maker, a tool allowing modification of map data, adding or editing roads, points of interest and other Google Map features where Google has limited map data, to India.  It had been open only to smaller island nations previously.

For those not blessed by Google/Yahoo/Mapquest, OpenStreetMap was previously the only option to allow citizen-cartographers to add and edit map features. Because it is open to everyone, the information can be old, missing and/or incorrect. For most points in the United States, the level of detail is pretty good but some other countries I checked were pretty blank besides main roads. The data is  Creative Commons licensed and free for use without any restrictions so if your mashup is localized to areas with good detail, OSM might be a good alternative to Google Maps. Its site is more barebones and focused on interacting with the map and not all the secondary services Google Maps supplies.

With many areas of rapid development and re-development in the United States that could benefit from Map Maker, I think it’s a matter of when it will get opened up the the US and not if. I just hope that OpenStreetMap’s community doesn’t lose contributers and that they do it for the love of cartography and don’t just target the bigger name.

After hearing the recent news that Openmoko, an open source mobile phone platform,  can run an ARM port of Debian Linux, I was happy for about a split second. The lofty expectations of my momentary euphoria, namely that there would be a viable, currently availible, alternative to Android that could run some sort of Java and possibly Groovy, were quickly dashed by reality. This realization was brought on by the fact that Openmoko is plagued by the Linux trap¹. There are currently four distributions². That’s three too many.

Love it or hate it, part of the reason the iPhone has done so well is that it is a single platform to target. Windows was fine too, until the 25 versions of Vista. The term "year of Desktop Linux" stopped becoming a farcical statement went Linux became concrete for the neophyte started to mean Ubuntu Linux and not the ethereal consortium of distros each tailored to someone’s whim.  In an already crowded mobile landscape, who in their right mind is going to develop for a platform with four different variants, each with their own possible quirks? What people need is the fallacy of choice, they would prefer that more than one option but not more than a handful. We already have the handful with iPhone, Android, Sybian, Windows Mobile and Palm, the market can't support another that has already split its internal market into 4 pieces.


¹The number of choices causes confusion and limited adoption.

²Only two of them are official distributions.

In the weeks since I released FriendBackup, there have been at least two other efforts(web sites) to accomplish the same goal. Since they were offering more than just backing up friends, it was about time I updated FriendBackup.

You can now backup followers, DMs, favorities and tweets in addition to your friends. Use care when downloading everything or you might max out. Because multiple streams are being backed up, I changed the file format to Excel (97/2000) to better group the data. Tweets, for instance, are on a different sheet from favorities and everything else. Here’s the obligatory screen shot:

The next set of updates will probably store a lightweight file with the vitals so that if you run it today and again two weeks from now, it’ll only download what is needed.

Unlike the backup websites, I don’t have to promise you I won’t keep your data because it never comes to me in the first place. All communication is between your machine and Twitter.

Password Keeper is a Groovy port of an AIR application of the same name featured on MakeUseOf.com. The Substance Look and Feel closely simulates the look of the source app. While I could have tweaked the fonts a bit but figured it wasn’t worth it for a quick port. On the backend, I’m using an instance of Derby(JavaDB) to store the passwords.

The original:

My version:

You can test run the app by visiting the link below: As usual, Java 6 is recommended.


You don’t always need AIR (or JFX), Java-based technologies can look pretty.

Even though I officially run with a different crew in the Java’hood, so to speak, I honestly wanted to be amazed by the JavaFX preview release. I wanted it to be some substance to back up all the chest-thumping grandstanding since last year’s JavaOne. It wasn’t.

The demo left me horribly underwhelmed. Numbering in the dozens, social media apps are an easy way of showing the wow factor of your platform while remaining accessible by normal users. IMHO, social media is a big reason (among others) of why Adobe AIR has caught on. The power play to Tonya Harding AIR would have been an app like Twirl, Twitterific, or Alert Thingy. Like I’ve said before, where is that killer JFX app? As competitors in the 2008 Script Bowl at JavaOne, Groovy, Scala, and JRuby have Twitter clients. Those languages which were deemed unworthy of JavaFX’s awesomeness have gone further in the RIA space than JavaFX itself. JavaFX has spawned many façade apps, ie pretty but non-functional and just for show. A buggy but functional demo is worth a million times more than the prettiest façade.

With moves like this JFX is DOA before it’s RIA.