Building a Simple Markdown PWA App / / No Comments While I didn’t share it on the blog, last week I tasked Claude with using Electron to build a Markdown viewer app. It was part test (how well can Claude work with Electron) and part real need – I work with Markdown files all the time but didn’t have a simple "view focused" application for it. I was sure there open source or paid app options out there, but I wanted my own. Claude did a pretty good job (you can see the source here) but one thing stood out to me – the size of the bundled app. I created both a Mac and Windows distribution and both were around 90 megs. That’s not huge of course, but still felt like a lot for what could – in theory –... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, Markdown, simple
Google Night View / / No Comments To ensure the highest quality Street View imagery for navigation, Google almost exclusively captures the world in broad daylight. But as any seasoned map-nerd knows, every system has its glitches. La Noche Cíclica is a fascinating Google Map project that highlights the rare, eerie, and often accidental moments when Street View goes dark. You can view the project’s documented night views simply Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Google, night, View
Summarizing Docs with Built-in AI / / No Comments Back in January of this year, I blogged about on-device summarization of PDFs: Summarizing PDFs with On-Device AI . In that post, I made use of Chrome’s Summary API and PDF.js to create summaries of PDFs completely within the browser. I thought I’d take a look at extending that demo into more document types, specifically Office. And even more specifically – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Here’s what I came up with. officeParser FTW So here comes the fun part. Last weekend I had this demo completely done using a few different libraries. Then – earlier this week one of the developer newsletters I subscribe to shared officeParser. This nifty library handles Office, PDF,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Builtin, Docs, Summarizing
what1tune – Musical Addresses / / No Comments Over the years, we’ve seen countless ways to navigate our world using various geohashing solutions. These systems – such as the popular what3words (which assigns three random words to every 3-meter square), or Google’s Plus Codes – aim to provide a simplified, human-readable way to identify precise locations where traditional street addresses fall short, such as in Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Addresses, Musical, what1tune
How Livable is Your Street? / / No Comments Strado is a new interactive mapping tool designed to provide objective livability scores for 50 major European cities, powered entirely by OpenStreetMap data. By clicking on any street on the Strado map, users receive a Livability Score and an Activity Score derived from an assessment of 22 different categories.How it WorksStrado analyzes the density of Points of Interest (POIs) to rank Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Livable, Street
Testing OCR with Chrome Built-in AI / / No Comments Sorry for the lack of posting this month. I’m on the way back home from speaking at CodeStock so I’ve been on the road a bit, and work has been incredibly busy (which is good!) so my usual blog cadence has slipped a bit. Luckily I had a great question in my session on Chrome’s Built-in AI which led to a bit of investigating last night. The question involved how well Chrome’s AI could do OCR on an image. I had a demo in my presentation showing using AI to describe an image and another to generate a list of tags, but not one specifically for OCR. Here’s what I found. Oh, before I get into the code – remember that as of the time I’m writing this, the Prompt... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Builtin, Chrome, Testing
Legible Rude Places Map / / No Comments This morning I was browsing Gary Gale’s Vaguely Rude Places map and realised that thanks to my deteriorating eye-sight I could no longer read all the hilariously rude place-names around the world. Instead of simply diving into my browser settings and magnifying the page I decided it would be far more satisfying to create my own map. Luckily for me Gary has provided links to easily download the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Legible, Places, Rude
The World in Motion / / No Comments This animated map displays worldwide air temperatures over the past week. It illustrates how temperatures shift daily, warming progressively from east to west as the Sun rises and sets across the globe.You might also be able to spot other patterns, such as the effects of jet streams, periods of intense summer heat, and sharp temperature drops during winter when polar air moves southward.Recently Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Motion, World