UseGIS News Update 02-12-2011

Welcome to a roundup of UseGIS news, views and tidbits that have caught our eye this week.

Our friends over at Cassini Publishing have just launched three historical Ordnance Survey map series of Ireland, originally published from as early as 1833.  This is the first time that two of these Irish map series have been made available in over 100 years. The three map series available are the First Edition Six-Inch or “Townland” maps surveyed between 1829 and 1843, the One-Inch First Edition and also the One-Inch Second Edition maps that chart the development of Ireland from the mid 19th Century through to the early 20th Century. We were contracted to reproject these map series from their original projection systems (Bonne and Cassini projections) to the current day Irish Grid and also integrate them into the Cassini Publishing map generation system.

We’ve also been hard at work this week implementing an update to the TrailZilla website.  This latest update has seen an improvement in the website responsiveness and an increase in the speed of retrieving and plotting map pins.  We’ve also added new customised registration forms for various affiliates (e.g. the AA and the Mountain Leader Training Association) which also provide access to special offers on Ordnance Survey mapping.  If you like outdoor activities or are just looking for a decent walk to burn off the excesses of the festive season, head over to TrailZilla to find a trail near you.

Over the years we’ve used many different design patterns in our PHP projects – there always seems to be a different “flavour of the month”.  However, this week we’ve been making greater use of PHP dependency injection and have to admit that our classes are more decoupled and the code is cleaner and easier to test and follow. If you want a good introduction to dependency injection, then this documentation offered by Symfony is a good starting point.

The news that this week saw the 30th anniversary of the BBC Microcomputer has left some of us here at UseGIS towers staring wistfully into the middle distance, while others now realise just how old they really are!  For many of us the “Beeb” offered the first experience of home computing and taught us the essentials of programming. Rob admits to still dreaming of playing Elite and blasting Thargoid ships into millions of pieces with a military laser.

Next week is the Bath Spark Xmas Meetup and we’ve been lucky enough to get tickets.  It will be our first Bath Spark event and have heard nothing but rave reviews, so we’re looking forward to meeting new people and talking tech over a few drinks.

Easy to use?

It shouldn’t be that difficult to make an application easy to use.

After all, as members of the human race, developers should all instinctively know when a widget or piece of functionality that they’ve just written is easy to use by others, right?

Well, it seems that’s generally not the case.

We’ve seen many, many instances where an application just doesn’t, in our opinion, work how it should.

One such situation just happened here at UseGIS Towers when an update to Adobe CS5 was being downloaded.

The process itself was reasonably self explanatory – the toolbar icon had the number 3 next to it, which indicated that 3 updates were available for install. Clicking on the icon allowed us to choose the “Updates” option. But as the updates were being downloaded the application insisted on showing the download time left in minutes and, more annoyingly, in decimal minutes.

Now, we do possess some mathematical skills here, so we could work out (even in our heads) that 1.9 minutes left actually meant 1 minute, 54 seconds – but why do we have to??? Since when did anyone use decimal minutes to describe a duration?

All I can think is that someone at Adobe got very lazy the day they wrote the download application – they couldn’t be bothered to multiply the decimal fraction by 60 to work out the number of seconds. And what’s possibly worse, the person who tested it (I am assuming that it was tested by someone else here, after all, we are talking about Adobe) must have thought it fun to have it that way too!

Sure, the duration is “correct” in that it’s not technically wrong. But is it user-friendly?