Visually stunning maps and PivotViewer
- by Rob Farley
One of the things about PivotViewer is that it runs in the Silverlight platform and can be extended recently. One of my guys at LobsterPot, Roger Noble, has used this to incorporate a Bing Maps layer, showing items which have Latitude and Longitude values there. We’re already talking to a hospital about using this to allow them to browse their patient data, including showing the patients on a map according to which bed they’re in. Interesting times – this will involve having custom tiles instead of the ones from Bing Maps, but the idea is similar. Of course, we’ll be using Bing Maps to show where the patients live. I should also mention that this is a work-in-progress still. Figuring out how to use PivotViewer isn’t trivial, and we’ve done quite a lot of experimenting to see how to get things working. If you find bugs, please feel free to let me know (rob_farley at hotmail will usually reach me), and we’ll add them to our list. Here are some screenshots that I made recently using the collection at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au/flickr – by selecting a tag, you can get a new bunch of images. A couple of images that were taken in Iceland. Some from St Mary’s Lighthouse near Newcastle, UK. And some from around Big Ben in London. I’d recommend using either Firefox or Internet Explorer if you choose to browse this yourself. It seems the Chrome browser support for Silverlight doesn’t quite handle things as nicely as we’d all like. I imagine that at some point, we may enhance the Flickr collection, to be able to search on more than tags, but as a sample collection, it seems to work quite well.
