Introducing View Finder, a web tool for evaluating the visual impact of new transmission corridors.

Placing power transmission lines across the landscape is a necessary to transmit energy from source to destination. Until we get a breakthrough in efficiency, distributed and localized generation, new transmission corridors will be needed.

Choosing where to put corridors is contentious and drawn-out - for example, see the well-documented campaign against new corridors in Virginia run by the Piedmont Environmental Council. Reviews take a long time, and require data, expert analysis, public and stakeholder consultation. What if new tools could help make the processes more effective?

Here are two such tools:

  • View Finder. A visibility analysis for the entire US, running in your browser. Discussed below.
  • Path Finder. A collaborative platform for contributing, assessing and commenting on corridor options.

These two tools alone don’t resolve all the challenges around corridor placement, but they represent small building blocks towards more inclusive and open processes.

What is View Finder?

View Finder uses freely-available datasets to calculate what can be seen from a particular location. While detailed viewshed analysis is expensive and slow, View Finder provides a rough sketch of the same information in seconds, right in your web browser.

From your browser, click a point on a map, or draw a path to represent a transmission corridor (shown green in the screenshot below). View Finder overlays two colors: blue, showing locations that can’t see the point or corridor, and pink for locations that can.

Pre-set options relevant to transmission corridors allow you to specify the height of the pylons. Taller corridor infrastructure increases the size of the possible viewing area.

Vegetation cover data are used to calculate summer and winter views, where the corridor is located in or near a deciduous forest.

The ground cover also affects how likely you are to see the corridor from each location - forest gets in the way more than scrubland, for example.

After tweaking the settings, share, save or print the viewshed.

Behind the scenes, View Finder uses the National Elevation Dataset, and the National Land Cover Dataset. Both are stored in Amazon Elastic Block Storage, and called as needed by a GRASS GIS script running in Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute to calculate the visibility for the current location. Map tiles showing the view shed are generated on the fly by Mapnik and stored for re-use.

View Finder is an integral part of Path Finder - to be covered in a follow-up post.


Querelous is a disruptive app for a disruptive technology. Why should creative graffiti be limited to human-readable materials?

See a QR code in the wild.

Use Querelous on your iphone to snap the QR code.

Querelous will decode the code, and search for a valid alternative that can be created by changing only a few pixels.

Uncap your black sharpie.

Follow the on-screen instructions, coloring in the indicated pixels to subtly subvert the code.

Recap sharpie and leave. Another QR code subverted!


Dot Dot Dot is a collaborative diagramming tool that embraces the messy nature of drawing out a process.

It’s more analogous to paper and pen tools than a fully-featured tool like OmniGraffle or Visio - think how Etherpad compares to Word.

But simplicity doesn’t mean Dot Dot Dot isn’t powerful:

Smart auto-layout tools allow you to focus on entering the diagram, not dragging boxes out from undereach other - click anywhere and start typing to create a new bubble.

Limited shapes and styling let you focus on the flow, not the look. But don’t worry: these default shapes are beautiful, but there’s full css control if you’d prefer to style your own or load a third-party template.

Magic imports - give Dot Dot Dot an outlined document (bullets, numbered, indented) and see a diagram produced.

Plug a feed into Dot Dot Dot to get a diagram that self-updates every time the feed changes


Export your diagram in a multitude of formats - images (you can link these into blog posts, etc), pdf, SVG for editable vector graphics, other graphing tools, outlines, dot files for graphviz, annotated text format with full revisions

But it’s really collaboration features that set Dot Dot Dot apart -

No logins: send someone a link, they can start editing right away


Review contributions using the innovative diagram timeline - Dot Dot Dot knows a layout tweak from a typo correction, and keeps track of changes to the diagram structure in a seperate stream to the formatting. Don’t let copyediting obscure bigger changes - quickly filter your timeline view to show the major diagram structure changes. Or maybe the color tweaks are your focus - choose to see those instead

Flexibility in diagramming approaches. Edit linearly if you think that way: add bubbles as parents, children or siblings of existing features.

But don’t be constrained - a collaborative workshop diagram is unbounded, and so is Dot Dot Dot. You can loop back, add comment bubbles, group bubbles together into neighborhoods, ringfence, box off, sideline, break the diagram apart, create nested sub-diagrams in boxes or links to other diagrams… Go wild.


Multiple authors can add separate items to a diagram simultaneously and join up later - ideal for note taking in a workshop or brainstorming an idea,


More mature diagrams will go through a lot of revisions - responsible contributors might want to leave a little note about their changes. Dot Dot Dot offers a few mechanisms for this: either comment in a bubble as you create it, so others can hover over it later to read them, or in the free-form notes area.


Or, hit the Commit With Comments button to tag your recent contributions with an explanation - the version control-like commit log can be reviewed later for an overview. Excellent transparency for changes. (There’s no need to ‘Commit’ for regular edits, of course - Dot Dot Dot saves incrementally all the time).


Owners and trusted authors can freeze some diagram elements. For example, you might want to get comments on a proposed timeline - draw the timeline and freeze it. Then, all comments and additions are an overlay on this frozen base.  Or freeze your starting point and goals, and let everyone map their way between them.

And there’s a finely configurable RSS feed so anyone can keep track of changes.

See you in diagramming heaven!


Csssearch (pronounced “scchearch”) is the first CSS search engine.

While other search sites index the web’s content, Csssearch goes after the layout. Using some clever cascade-aware logic as it munches CSS files, the search tools give you the web in its non-semantic glory. Who cares about the content, let’s look at the layout!

Search in your web history, delicious bookmarks or the entire web. Great for the forgetful, people with better visual memories and anyone looking for code or design case studies. For example -

  • find that three column layout you saw last month
  • get back to the page with those chunky black text labels
  • look at some sites with pale blue backgrounds
  • find examples of browser-compatible layout tricks
  • enter a specific css phrase to see it in action

The API allows for some intriguing exploratory tools, including a neat dynamic layout browser. As you resize your mini version, adjusting headers, columns, spacing etc, real world examples of similar layouts are fetched from the index and displayed in thumbnail form below.

Csssearch: all the benefits of a search engine, with none of the content!


Come to the Mapture! Bring your latest work in progress to share with the crowd - city planners, neo-geographer, urban designers, architects, open source mappers, data crunchers and all.

Come and hear what’s happening in the map making and urban data scene. Bring ideas. Bring slides on a memory stick. Bring paper maps. Bring incomplete failed projects. Show off your latest web app. Lurk in the crowd. Take lots of notes. Give criticism.  Drink beer. Talk.

Venue, date and time to be confirmed.


Key-iP Compact (pronounced keep, the iP stands for iPhone) is the fix for your finger-aching, composition skill destroying virtual iPhone keyboard.

Slotting either side of the iPhone, Key-iP creates an ergonomic split keyboard, with the phone in portrait mode in the middle. Learning from the wonderful portable palm keyboards, a simple grasp on the sides of the board unhinged it into two folding flaps. Either keep the iPhone sandwiched in the middle, or slide it out. In folded mode, the keyboard is only slightly bigger that the phone.

Pulling power from the base of the handset, the keyboard requires no batteries, and communicates with the phone via a very low power Bluetooth signal. The updated Apple spec for external devices allows the Key-iP to work without the onscreen keyboard - more screen real estate for editing.

Arrow keys, shift, caps lock, copy, paste and numerical keys. No batteries required, and so light you won’t notice it in your bag. Ideal for writing on the go, finally killing off your persistent netbook temptation.

You want to write seriously with an iPhone? Time to Key-iP it real with a Key-iP Compact.


Open data scorecards are SeeClickFix for government data websites.

Let’s say you are interested in finding out how much money Christie spent getting elected Governor of NJ? After some Googling, you probably find the NJ Election Law Enforcement Commission website and the section with public filings and campaign reports.

But wait! No RSS feed? No feed opportunities of any kind? Great work with the full data download as csv though. Reach for an open data scorecard and rate what’s there and what is missing. The scorecard uses the Sebastapol Eight open data principles, phrased to make applying them to a website easy - access restrictions? recent data? feeds? machine readable files? Click click click submit.

Maybe you are more interested in the Nassau Executive race. The Board of Elections site doesn’t offer any data - “filings are open to public inspection” only means that printed copies can be viewed. Time for another scorecard!

The scorecard website aggregates all the results, showing the cumulative build-up of issues with any single site. And everything is republished through an API, so others can build tools from the scorecard ratings - making State of Data overviews easy.

Open Data Scorecards: aggregating the data smarts of the crowd, and letting frustrated data searchers express their displeasure, all for the common good.


Task lists always assume that “today” is before midnight, and “tomorrow” is after. In the small hours, scheduling new items becomes tricky - do I really mean today, or tomorrow? Is that task really overdue or am I getting to it later in this session? Wasn’t I going to do that tomorrow? Wait, is it tomorrow already? But I’m not done!

Introducing Adjustable Midnight: click Settings, then choose when the day ends. It’s your working day, don’t be hostage to the rigors of convention.

Applies to Remember the Milk, Todist, etc. Adjustable Midnight will be the One Click of task lists. But free.


EmDeG (Exhibit my Delicious Graffle) combines three fantastic tools into one killer web app for making sense of data - here’s how it stacks up:

So why is EmDeG useful?

Let’s say you are collecting data on various map sources or perhaps open planning tools. Delicious is great for the first five or ten items, but then things start to get complicated - it’s hard to see all the items or have any kind of structure, and dynamically assessing what you have is difficult.

Enter Exhibit - a fantastic and under-used tool from the Haystack group at MIT. Filter your list by keywords, search dynamically and add grouping headers. Suddenly a long list becomes more manageable. It works well for lists of like and non-alike items - see this example of student groups - but doesn’t work so well for dynamically exploring data in the style of the all-conquering pivot table. Perhaps you want to view data by state, or source, or year.  Facette does a neat job with these first two steps, but wouldn’t it be great to view your data in a graphical layout?

And for flow charts and beautiful data layouts, nothing comes close to OmniGraffle. Wish it was cheaper and had a windows or web version, but these are side comments. For making charts of complex structured data, it’s really superb. Neat as graphviz iz, izznot OmniGraffle.

So why put these tools together? EmDeG takes the best of all three, giving fast exploration of structured data, even when the structure might be distributed across many tags (think state names, platforms, programming languages). And the delicious foundation means that everything is dynamically powered by a widely used data collection platform - I put a link into your inbox, and all your org charts update automatically. Putting information into flow charts and organization diagrams leads to meaningful visualization, beyond long list syndrome. Grab tags to make them headers, or to cluster items into blobs.  Of course, as a web tool, you get wiki-like collaborative editing and sharing, urls to view charts as an image, etc.