Digital Globe Tutorial

We put together a tutorial for Digital Globe layers.

Alaska is pretty

Digital Globe has a pretty nice API based off of Mapbox technology.  Or administered by Mapbox?  Not totally clear on that.  Anyway, it's good.

The Tutorial

All the good stuff is in the tutorial.  I suggest you go check that out.  Here's another picture.

Trippy.  Or elevation.  One of those

Anyway, Digital Globe is a great source of high resolution timely satellite imagery.  Because of course it is.  That's what they do.

Swift Support

It's new, it's trendy, it's the latest thing: Swift support in WhirlyGlobe-Maply!

Swift has been in there since 2.4.1 (soon 2.5), but we haven't really pointed it out.

Why Swift?

I'm not the audience for Swift.  My favorite language is a mixture of C++ and Objective-C.  You get STL containers, blocks, and ARC.  It's awesome.  Why are you backing away?  Let me tell you more!

This is why I work with other humans.  José was quite interested in Swift and did the bulk of the work.

Swift Interfaces & Documentation

The main issue was Swift bindings for all the various methods.  Swift can interface to Objective-C just fine, but if you want to make it pleasant, it should look like this.

He did that everywhere and tested it out.  The result is a nice, pleasant Swift interface to the main library.  But we didn't stop there.

Feel the learning!

The tutorials have tabs for Objective-C and Swift!

Swift Tests

In the new AutoTester app (post forthcoming) José wrote a bunch of Swift test cases.  These have a pleasing rhythm to them.

Swift-ly into the Future

We're getting user submitted github Issues in Swift now.  Not about Swift mind you, just in Swift.  So that seems to be working.

As Apple changes the language we'll keep up and I think a few new WhirlyGlobe-Maply apps may be written in Swift.

Dark Sky for Android

They launched a few weeks ago, but we haven't talked about it yet (here).  Dark Sky for Android!

That's some weather.

Man, that was a lot of work.

Weather Apps Are Popular Apps

The service, the UI, the data, notifications, and the globe are the big pieces of Dark Sky.  We make the globe.

Dark Sky is really popular and has a particularly loyal following.  In just about any group I meet, there's a good percentage who use it regularly.  I'm not reticent about using that fact.

So Much Android So Little Time

The Android port took a while on my end.  I could have done a hacky version, but that wouldn't work for everyone else.  No, we had to port the toolkit in a way Android developers would find friendly.

Totally not a screenshot from Keynote.

The C++ core, which does the rendering and manages the low level objects is (will be) the same on iOS and Android.  But everything above that level had to be new.

Developers expect their toolkits to be familiar on the local platforms.  That means Swift interfaces and dispatch queues for iOS, Runnables and integer colors for Android.  And lots and lots of other things.  This takes time.

Back To Dark Sky

For Dark Sky Android we ported the parts they needed and filled out the underpinnings.  This was by far the biggest app yet released with WhirlyGlobe-Maply on Android.

That's some more weather.

Dark Sky launched on Android with a subscription model.  Apple totally thought of that first and recently announced a similar one.  I'd love to see that take off on both platforms.

In the mean time, go buy it!

Welcome to wetter.com!

I'm proud to welcome the German wetter.com iOS app to the WhirlyGlobe-Maply family.

The wetter.com app presents regional weather, including predictions, on a map.

Details, details, details

It's funny to celebrate a flat map when the toolkit does a globe.  But for a regional app, the globe doesn't make sense.  The flat map simplifies things for the user and lets us optimize the data transport.  All the good stuff we do on the globe works on the map.

The app itself shows current predictions, recent radar, and cloud cover.  As well as some other cool non-map related stuff like weather cams.

Are those labels on top of the weather?  Oh my!

Mobile hardware is really good these days.  Since we're no longer planning for the iPad2 we can do some really great OpenGL ES shader work.  If you zoom in close, you'll see some great spatial and temporal interpolation.

The Inevitable Marketing Push

There are a lot of regional weather apps for iOS and Android.  Not so much in the United States where almost all the data comes from NOAA.

In the rest of the world weather data tends to be less free and more complicated.  Add to that language and local preference and you get a lot of interesting, distinct regional weather apps.  If you make one of those and want to upgrade your graphics, let's talk!