Open Letter to Delta Airlines

Dear Delta,

First, have to prefix this letter with the following; being a million miler, I love flying with you and the little perks I get; like my wife being upgraded to first class on a 14 hour flight, while I hanged in the back with the kids - MAJOR POINTS for me _and_ you :-)
However (and here is the rub), I'm ticked at your ticketing system (kinda funny this play on word :-) about how it interacts, or most likely does not interact with our corporate travel department. See, I have an upcoming opportunity to travel coast to coast one week after another. When I submitted my two travel requests to fly Delta, Corporate kicked it back saying that Delta is more expensive ($200 and $300 more) than Virgin on one and AA on the other. Grrr, you don't fight Travel in these economic times. And...well I kinda wanted to try Virgin as I heard so much about it, but AA, no way! Had to admit defeat and take what was given to me, and then I started thinking. I do travel on one of these submitted trips very often and Delta _must_ know this. They _should_ have "bent" a little on the price for my business. I've been reading "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" by Chris Anderson (BTW, you can get his book for free) and I'm not saying I have to fly for free, but hear me out. What if you offered a free system that allows corporate travel departments to enter my frequent flier number, my upcoming trips, and (here is the important part) a form of a bid for these trips. In my case, $200 and $300 dollar less that the "list" price.
You, given my history and preferences, can look at me "holistically" and can accept that bid. Propose something that is close, say within $40, the "bend" which Travel will accept the difference, after all they _are_ trying to accommodate me. Or you can totally reject the bid. What I mean by holistically, is that in today's world of data mining from me (you have over 10 years worth of travel info on me), my fellow travelers and other external information, you _should_ be able to determine a price point (even at a _small_ loss today) that is acceptable to both parties, as you _will_ make it up and be profitable later. I'm sure somewhere in the bowels of your IT department you are brewing something like that. If not, then you should look at these recommendation engines (like what Amazon and Netflix has) for your frequent fliers. Anyway, this advise is free on the hope that such a holistic system will exist. Looking forward to traveling with you when the price is right to Corporate.

Regards,
Mansour

Map Layer From Local Shapefile

In this post, I will demo how to load a local shapefile from your hard drive, and overlay it on an map whose base layer is derived from a remote ArcGIS server. Using the Flash Player 10 FileReference API, this task is fairly easy. However, I did not want the user to be prompted for each imported file as a shapefile is composed of a .shp file holding the geometry and a .dbf file holding the attributes. So, the idea is to zip the shp and dbf and load the zip, and then let the application unzip the content and parse the shp and dbf entries. The application is using the Flex API for AGS and makes use of two wonderful as3 library; the shp library from Edwin van Rijkom, and a zip library from David Chang. In this application, I created a custom geometry to take advantage of the coordinate array format in the shapefile reducing the impedance and taking advantage of the "compression". Well, this not truly compressed - this an array of x,y,x,y,etc... rather than an array of MapPoint instances :-) and since this a custom geometry, well then you need a custom symbol to render that geometry. In this demo, I wanted to load and display the output of a plume model/process, and here is the result:

You can download the zip file from here, and you can see the application in action here. And like usual, the source code is here.
10/10/09 - I've updated the source to be a bit more robust - BTW, this only handles polygon shapes.

Horizontal Map Slider

A customer emailed me asking me how to create a horizontal map slider using the Flex API for AGS. The Map component has a property navigationClass to enable users to define a custom navigation class.

    <esri:Map navigationClass="com.esri.sample.MyNavigation">

In this sample, I defined a reference to the class com.esri.sample.MyNavigation which is a subclass of the Navigation class.

    public class MyNavigation extends Navigation
    {
        public function MyNavigation()
        {
            mx_internal::layoutObject.direction = BoxDirection.HORIZONTAL;
            navigationSliderClass = MyNavigationSlider;
        }

        /**
         * Override the order of the components.
         */
        override protected function addZoomInZoomOutComponents(zoomInButton:UIComponent, zoomOutButton:UIComponent):void
        {
            addChild(new Spacer());
            addChild(zoomOutButton);
            addChild(zoomInButton);
            addChild(new Spacer());
        }
    }

In the constructor, I defined the box direction (note the mx_internal :-) and my own custom slider. In addition, I've overwritten the addZoomInZoomOutComponents function to specify the order of the in/out buttons. Lastly, I defined a custom navigation slider to ensure the direction is horizontal.

    public class MyNavigationSlider extends NavigationSlider
    {
        public function MyNavigationSlider()
        {
            direction = SliderDirection.HORIZONTAL;
            maxHeight = 25;
        }
    }

Here is the final result, and like usual the source code is here.

iPhone Isometric Shapefile Viewer

Not sure if some of you have see the 3D in-door routing application that I did for the ESRI 2009 User Conference. I used Papervision3D for this app, and was a lot of fun to develop. A couple of weeks before the conference, I decided to implement the same app on an iPhone using Obj-C. Being a newbie in the latter, I ramped up quickly on the language (got quickly over my hang ups on bracket, and kinda like the language :-). I started to look at the 3D built-in engine that uses a derivative of OpenGL and thought that I will not have the time to get this up and running. So I started to look for simpler alternatives. I read Keith Peters' most excellent AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation book and used his A* implementation for client side routing application with barriers. check it out here. The next chapter in the book is all about isometric projection. This is exactly what I needed, an isometric view of the CDCC floors and rooms with a small twist, where the user can rotate the view.
So before doing a full Obj-C dive, I prototyped my application in Flex/AS3. The idea was to read a 3D shapefile (thanks Edwin), apply a rotation matrix on the original coordinates and then pass them through Peters isometric utility class. Once debugged and got it up and running (check out the app here, hold and drag the mouse to rotate the view), I ported the code to Obj-C. Check out this post to see some iPhone app snapshots. Like usual, here is the source code of the flex app.

Cool Flex API for AGS Samples

My friend and colleague _extraordinaire_ Kerry Coffin been working with the Flex API for AGS, and send me the following list of samples:

Linear Grid: This app shows a linear grid distance (miles, km etc) on a geographic map. Zoom In; pan north and south;change the number of grids;etc. Notice the grid width displayed. Also change the units.

Graticule: This app shows a Lat/Lon graticule in a web Mercator map. Zoom in continually. Notice how the graticule adjusts.

SimpleGraticule: This app shows a Lat/Lon graticule in a Geographic map. Zoom in continually. Notice how the graticule adjusts.

Quad Tree: This app shows a quad tree component that can index and search points in a client app. Add a bunch of points (Pick add 10K points). Drag the mouse to search. Try adding 10K more. Search again. The app shows you how the indexing is done.

Polynomial transformation: This app shows how to warp any image and overlay it on a map. (polynomial transformation) Press show resulting image. Change the order to 2. The user selects common points from both left and right. I’ve preloaded the app with a bunch of common points.

Normal Contours: Click to add elevation points. Pick a few points with elevation 100. Change the elevation to 105 pick a few more. Etc. Turn off the triangles to see only contours. (similar to the 3d app…except just contours)

And last my 3D app. It’s similar to using the contouring app.

MGRS: For the MGRS app, pan around the map by dragging your mouse. Of particular interest is the north pole, as most people leave off these zones, and they don’t draw curves.
If you zoom out, the scale dependency of the MGRS Layer turns off the finer grids. (MGRSLayer is implemented by extending Layer and implementing updateLayer()). The curves are drawn by doing the following algorithm: I don’t brute force it and add a trillion points and then project. To draw a line I project the 2 endpoints to pixel locations, and then project the mid point to its pixel location. I then compare the mid point’s projected pixel location to its pixel location by averaging the two endpoints. If the locations differ by more then one pixel…I do this to both halfs. This algorithm is done “logically” recursively…but I set a limit as to how many midpoints I add.

Indoor Routing for UC2009 on iPhone

Yes - just finished a native iPhone application (not using Safari) that uses the ArcGIS Server REST endpoint to create a 3D path between rooms in the San Diego Convention Center for the 2009 User Conference - this is _not_ an officially endorsed application (Yet :-) but for me, it was a great experience to see if I can get the iPhone to connect to AGS and render the result path in 3D as vector graphics. Yes, vector graphics - this is _not_ an image - if you drag your finger across the screen, the SDCC floor will rotate to give you a different perspective of the path. Cool eh ? Will be showing up at the UC on Monday, so stop by the Flex booth if you wanna see it live and have an AR version on the browser - AR you ask ? Just stop by :-) Here are some screenshots of the app - looking forward to seeing a lot of u there.

Mapping EXIF Images With GPS Info

Was tasked to load an EXIF image with GPS info onto a map using the Flex API for AGS. So I first looked around for existing AS3 libraries and found ExifInfo. Downloaded it and tried it, but somehow it failed loading some EXIF images. Then I remembered a JavaScript library that a colleague pointed it out to me. So I ported the code to AS3 (optimization will come later) and here is the result. I used picasa to load some images and geo-tagged them using Google Earth (that is from the Tools menu BTW) and it worked pretty well. I borrowed some ideas and code from the author of ExifInfo and made my own EXIF mxml enabled class. Like usual here is the source code. BTW - There is a TextInput field at the bottom of the application, enter the url of your image (make sure that you have a crossdomain.xml at the base of your url) and if the image has EXIF GPS info, the map will display it. Try "assets/sample1.jpg" and hit enter.