Subway Specs – Part III / / No Comments Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station is the world’s busiest train station. Its is used by over 3.5 million passengers every day. To cope with that amount of traffic the station has to be very big. It has 35 platforms, while another 17 platforms can be accessed through hallways to 5 directly connected stations without traveling outside. With over 35 million platforms and over 200 station exits it can be Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: part, Specs, Subway
Where Might I Live? / / No Comments There are 3,143 counties in the USA. One of them is probably perfect for you. But which one?What makes a perfect home can depend on a number of factors. Those factors are likely to be different for every single person. Where Might I Live can find your perfect US home based on your own personal criteria. Tell Where Might I Live what factors are important to you in choosing a home and it will Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: live, might
Destroying People’s Homes in Gaza / / No Comments The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has begun creating interactive 3D models of destroyed homes, hospitals and businesses in order to help convey the devastation that ongoing military conflicts can have on ordinary people’s lives. Using photogrammetry the ICRC has managed to create harrowing 3D models of an apartment block in Gaza destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in 2021, a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Destroying, Gaza, home's, People's
Using Generative AI to Detect Cat Breeds / / No Comments Let’s be honest, what other use is there for generative AI than working with cats? If you read my previous post on Google’s Gemini AI launch, you may have seen my test prompts asking it to identify the kind of cat shown in a picture. I decided to turn this into a proper web application as a real example of the API in action. Here’s what I came up with. The Front End # For the front end, I decided to make use of a native web platform feature to access the user’s camera via a simple HTML form field. By using capture="camera" on an input tag, you directly get access to the device camera. There are more advanced ways of doing this, but for quick and simple, it works... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Breeds, Detect, Generative, using
Coins Hoards from the Roman Empire / / No Comments Ancient Rome had significant trade links with India, particularly during the Roman Empire under the rule of Augustus and onwards. The Silk Road and Indian Ocean trade routes facilitated the exchange of goods to Rome from India, including textiles, spices, gems, and other luxury items. You can find evidence of this trade between the Roman Empire and India on this interactive map of Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Coins, Empire, from, Hoards, Roman
AutoGrow Textareas with CSS / / No Comments As the demands of the web change and developers experiment with different user experiences, the need for more native language improvements expands. Our presentation layer, CSS, has done incredibly well in improving capabilities, even if sometimes too slow. The need for native support for automatically expanding textarea elements has been long known…and it’s finally here! To allow textarea elements to grow vertically and horizontally, add the field-sizing property with a value of content: textarea { field-sizing: content; // default is `fixed` } The default value for field-sizing is fixed, signaling current behavior. The new behavior, content, will expand as much as possible.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: AutoGrow, Textareas
How Well Do You Know New York’s Subway? / / No Comments Following the huge success of his London Tube Memory Game Benjamin Tran Dinh released a New York subway version of the game, called the New York City Subway Memory Game.Benjamin’s game requires you to name all 472 New York City subway stations. The game is therefore more of a marathon than a sprint and I suspect will take you at least a few hours to complete. If you don’t have that much time to Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: know, Subway, Well, York's
An Image Dialog Web Component / / No Comments A lot of the talk (well, on Mastodon at least) lately concerning web components has been on "HTML Web Components". The idea is that web components can progressively enhance "regular" HTML in the DOM instead of completely blowing it away with the Shadow DOM. (You can find a deeper discussion of this in Jim Nielsen’s blog post.) This is something that’s been on my mind for a while now as well and I’ve kept my eyes open for opportunities to build web components that enhance, not replace, content. With that in mind, I built a really simple component that does something fun. We’ve all seen sites that use JavaScript to provide a thumbnail and detail view... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Component, Dialog, Image