Before the first line of code was laid for 93 Photo Street, while I was making the rounds with a bag full of paper prototype clippings and wild ideas about the future of how people can communicate their spacial reality, I knew that whatever I built would encompass precious few of the geographical ideas floating on the net. I am constantly humbled by the variety and grandeur of peoples' ideas about where we can go with geo communication.
As a toolmaker, this situation can be addressed by thinking and listening carefully as your tools are composed and used in performance and then recognizing when they can be decomposed into individually addressable slices... to know when to decouple a front end from a back end, when a web service is smarter than a local algorithm, when a community is more than a customer. Not only will people recombine slices in unexpected ways (a unique joy for me) but their remixes will enrich your understanding of what you have built so that your next steps are taken with a deeper understanding.
In 93 Photo Street, the template engine serves as one such decoupling by providing an open language with which people can take 93 Photo Street's form of "photo map" (map objects and images in the Velocity context) and remix it to feed their own expression. While 93 Photo Street ships with templates to generate a certain style of static HTML sites, templates have been mixed by geo thinkers to create the backing data for mapping experiments like the worldkit and pointMapper. I do what I can to reward new template ideas.
The ability to incorporate map images is another decoupling, as it allows people to mix in their own spaces with the (cartesian, governmentally created, "base truth") road maps. We can merge maps or even completely replace the road maps by laying our map images on areas where the roads don't go and ignoring the rest. We can create photo maps of fictional places, like Springfield. Map images decouple the structure of photo maps created in the 93 Photo Street editor from a single type of map.
I have been considering another slice for 93 Photo Street. Right now the pattern is to take in maps and images, to geolocate and label images, and then to mix them together in varying forms onto the local disk. This is very flexible, as it allows us to do a wide variety of things with those files. We upload them to web servers, add them to our archives, and zip them up and email them to friends (to name just a few).
But there are many places for photo maps other than your local disk. Too many, in fact, for me to support them all: "Save Map to TypePad", "Print", "Add to Wiki", "Write to CD", "Update Trip Diary", "Add to thingster.org" ...
The net is a huge mess of services, protocols, data stores, and wonderful people who make them possible.
After emailing and chatting with many geo developers, it is apparent to me that often they stumble or quit when they get to the point of writing a UI for their new project. It takes a non-trivial amount of work to handle the intricacies of even a simple UI like 93 Photo Street's, and (even worse) it requires them to understand concepts from various complex domains such GIS and HCI. This is changing as more open source building blocks are available, but today it is still a huge hurdle for most developers.
So I'm working on a slice so that programmers can write their own publishers for 93 Photo Street. The experience of editing a photo map will remain basically unchanged, but instead of having only "Build Site..." there will be a way for other people to add their own "Build Something..."
For people who aren't programmers, I assure you that I do not intend to turn 93 Photo Street into a bucket of parts which you have to wire together to make a photo map. As with templates and imported map images, new publishers will take part in a smooth photo mapping experience. Apple's iTunes is an example of this sort of approach. For almost everyone, the experience is "Rip, Mix and Burn" with no fuss and little muss. But at the same time there are thousands of applescripts and plugins which people have created for everything from blogging your current song to changing volume with your cell phone.
Making a photo map in 93 Photo Street will never require that you break out a debugger.
I do not believe that 93 Photo Street's editor is currently suitable for every single geo project, but I know that many of the budding geo web services fit its model very well, and that with feedback and further development many more could use it to avoid so many of the project killing problems that face geo developers. I hope that they will tell me what they want from such a tool.
The ideas in this post are all in a very early stage, similar to the one I mentioned at the start, in which I was carrying about snippets of paper showing maps, image piles, and pictures of stickpins. This won't be available tomorrow, or even in the upcoming 93 Photo Street V1.1.
That said, I value your comments and email and I will keep you up to date if you will keep me honest.
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