Astronomy software for the iPhone

Posted on December 2, 02008
Filed Under Astronomy, Inspiration, Journal | Leave a Comment

Almost all calendar systems are approximations of astronomical cycles, and it follows then that a solid grounding in astronomy is a prerequisite for understanding any calendrical system. The thing is, if you want to understand astronomy and you live in a built up area, you'll find that light pollution makes it very hard to see all but the brightest objects in the night sky.

Last night I popped outside to scan the skies for an interesting astronomical event... as you do. About 6pm UTC the moon passed in front of Jupiter. Scanning the skies for the lunar occultation I was reminded of how easy it was to find my way around the sky using the astronomy software on my old Palm palmtop. These days I carry an iPhone so I decided to hit the Apple AppStore to see what astronomy software is out there.

GoSkyWatch

Developer: GoSoftWorks
Cost: $9.99
Link: http://www.gosoftworks.com/GoSoftWorks/Home.html

What I like about GoSkyWatch is that it's not a straight port of some existing software. It plays to the unique features and strengths of the iPhone. GoSkyWatch is optimised for quick rendering. Maybe I'm a UX junkie but even though some of the other software I found offers more in terms of deep sky detail, the fluidity of accelerometer tracking was really impressive.

StarMap

image of StarMap Pro

Developer:
Frédéric Descamps

Cost:
StarMap:€ 9.99, $11.99
StarMap Pro tba

Link:
http://www.star-map.fr/

Looking at the info on StarMap it seemed to be the most sophisticated iPhone astronomy software currently on the market. Then I got wind of StarMap Pro. Due in January 2009, it's a whole new world of wow. It sports a much larger Ephemeris (22600 objects with rise, transit and set times), telescope control (yes you read that right), eyepiece emulation and a raft of other features. This sounds like a must have for any serious iPhone carrying astronomer.

Starry Night Mobile

Developer:
Imaginova Corp

Cost:
Free

Link:
http://www.space.com/snserver/iphone/

Starry Night is the king of astronomy software. It's been around forever and is available in a version to suit every wallet. What's interesting about this version is that it's free. That's because strictly speaking this isn't software - it's a website. The whole experience is optimised for viewing on the iPhone. Just follow the link above, set your viewing location and let the app do the rest. I suspect this is probably a stopgap app until they can get a proper iPhone app to market. They are going to have to go some to beat StarMap Pro though.

Honerable mentions:
Clear Sky Charts , Distant Suns , iAstronomica , iStellar (Japansese) , Phases

Arboreal longevity

Posted on November 19, 02008
Filed Under Chronometry, Inspiration, Journal | Leave a Comment

This Swedish Spruce is the world's oldest living tree. The stem you can see in the picture is 13 foot tall and less than 600 years old, but what interests us is what's underground.

Professor Leif Kullman of Umeå University explains, "as soon as a stem dies, a new one emerges from the same root stock, so the tree has a very long life expectancy."

Recent radio carbon dating at a lab in Miami found three generations of wood amongst the roots system dating back 375 years, 5,660 years and a staggering 9,500 years old. What's more all generations share the same genetic sequence, meaning this tree originally germinated just after the last ice age.

Photograph by Leif Kullman of Umeå University's Department of Ecology and Environmental Science

Time machine user interfaces: Quantum Leap

Posted on November 14, 02008
Filed Under Drama, Inspiration, Interface | Leave a Comment

Quantum Leap (1989 - 1993)

User Interface: The Handlink
It's not quite an iPhone, more of a pocket calculator glued to some Lego, but at least the Handlink appears to have some sort of user interface. Having spent the first 6 months of this year battling the UI on a bottom-of-the-range LG handset, I'm sure it couldn't be any worse than that.

Rome Reborn

Posted on November 12, 02008
Filed Under Archeology, History, Inspiration | Leave a Comment

The Rome Reborn project set out to create a digital model of ancient Rome at the height of it's power in 320 AD. The first version of the model containing digital terrain and around 7000 buildings was completed in 2007.

Version 2 (or Rome Reborn 2.0 as they have taken to calling it) was debuted at Siggraph earlier this year. Firstly the version 1 models were imported into Procedural's amazing CityEngine software. Under the supervision of archaeologists the models were refined and the detail improveda and I think the results are really amazing.

The model data is available over the internet in a couple of ways. Using the Reality Server interface (authored in Flex) users can select a view of the city and have it rendered on the fly by Mental Images RealityServer and have it returned to them.

The other way to access the data was announced by Google at a press conference in Rome earlier today. Ancient Rome 3D is to be the first historical 3D geographical layer in Google Earth. The KML Collada models in Google Earth are obviously not as detailed as the full Rome Reborn 2.0 models but they may be of interest to any Papervision3D developers looking for ready-made old buildings.

Flash on the beach, HEAD and the 2nd Greenwich Time Symposium

Posted on November 6, 02008
Filed Under Culture, Flash, History, Inspiration, Journal | Leave a Comment

Where did summer go? October just seems to have flown by and suddenly we're back into long nights and cold weather. If you're in the southern hemisphere I'm sure you're already breaking out the bbqs! I can't quite believe everything that has happened this month. It's been a busy month so I thought I'd write some of it up here.

The Computus Engine
Most importantly I've finally had some quiet time in between projects and have begun porting my AS2 Timeline code over to AS3. This library will be the backbone of all the future visualisation work. At the moment I have a working resizable static timeline that can show any period type from seconds up to millennia. It's not really ready for primetime yet so I'm going to carry on tweaking it until it's in good enough shape to demo.

The Open Knowledge Foundation
I've mentioned before that I'm primarily interested in developing temporal interfaces. My general feeling about data is to support as many sources and schemas as possible. That way I can hook easily into many other projects. Last month I had a very nice email from Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation. They have an interesting project called Microfacts Weaving History which aims to create narratives by combining temporal facts into timelines. It sounds like we're approaching the same problem from different angles. Hopefully we will be able to help each other.

Flash on the beach 2008

The month got started with Flash on the beach, the big annual UK Flash conference, which is held just along the coast from me in Brighton. We cover the con every year for FlashMagazine and this one was as good as ever. I won't cover the same stuff here but if you're interested you can read our coverage here.

If you follow any Flash blogs then you'll no doubt be aware that this year was controversial for a couple of reasons. The first involved a news story we posted regarding a Flash player that Adobe are developing for the iPhone. Although this was later played down by Adobe it was certainly news to us, and looking at how quickly the story was picked up by rest of the blogosphere it was news to everyone else as well. The story continues to run weeks after we broke it and was even picked up by The Guardian just the other day. Anyway, I won't get any further into that one today.

I would though, like to consider the other big con-troversy (sorry); namely the closing remarks of Jonathan Harris. For those unfamiliar, Jonathan followed up a retrospective of his work with a series of slides and a crie de cour to concentrate on work that matters. His comments stayed with me and I find that interesting. Any speaker who makes you think or reconsider is worth listening to, especially if the advice isn't palatable. Rather than offer up a knee jerk reaction I wanted to stew on it for a bit to decide how I really feel.

I'd recommend viewing the slide deck, reading Johanathan's transcript (and subsequent reaction) and then listening to a recording of the session before making up your own mind. I wrote a whole article about this then binned it as I'm probably over-analyzing it. In the end I agree with most of his points but I think an over-zealous delivery alienated his audience.

The <HEAD> Conference 2008
The last weekend of the month was something of a blur. On the Friday night I was lucky enough to be invited to the London hub of the inaugural <HEAD> conference. Jeremy Keith opened the day with a talk entitled The Long Web in which he appealed for some long term thinking (a subject close to my heart) about preserving digital archives.

The final guest of the day was Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly media and the man generally credited with coining the phrase web 2.0. This session took the form of a chat on the couch.

I think this really typified the appeal of the whole con. It was loose, friendly and dare-I-say-it "home made". I mean that in a good way. A lot of hard work and enthusiasm went into pulling it off and Aral and the team are to be congratulated for what they've achieved.

The 2nd Annual Greenwich Time Symposium
The day after <HEAD> I was off to Greenwich for a very interesting day at the 2nd annual Greenwich Time Symposium. About 50 people gathered at the National Maritime Museum to learn and discuss the history of Daylight Saving Time.

David Rooney, the RGOs Curator of Timekeeping, began by relating the story of London builder William Willett and his campaign to change our nations clocks to make better use of summer daylight. David has just finished researching a book on Willett and we were joined in the audience by two generations of the Willett family.

Our next speaker was David Prerau, author and DST consultant to the U.S Congress. David's talk was an authoritative and often hilarious history of DST in America. A lot of material was culled from his recent book Saving the Daylight (or Seizing the Daylight in the U.S.), and is well worth picking up.

After lunch Andrew Saint, Professor of Architecture at Cambridge gave us a tour of buildings built by the Willett family in London and Hove. The final speaker of the day was James Nye of the Institute of Historical Research. His session revolved around a fictional account of a dinner between Willett and two time company lobbyists.

Before I attended the symposium I was completely against DST. This was mainly due to the headaches it causes me as programmer. By the end however I had relaxed my position. I can now see the social value of DST, particularly it's measurably beneficial effects on road safety and crime. That said, it's unregulated adhoc application is still a minefield.