ProjectX Blog

Wellington, New Zealand, 12 July 2010

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Able Technology has acquired the on-line mapping and addressing business of ProjectX Technology Ltd.

The acquisition promises an exciting future for ProjectX developments such as the Address Finder service and mapping applications.

Able Technology director Marcus Baguley says ProjectX’s expertise in geospatial data and mapping services will enable Able Tech to quickly deliver location-based applications; from hand held apps to large corporate websites that want to geo-enable existing datasets.

“The acquisition strengthens our specialised online mapping and data visualisation capabilities,” says Marcus.

The move is a natural progression for Able Tech, an influential member of Wellington’s growing Ruby on Rails software development community.

John Clegg, founder and CEO of ProjectX, says he is very pleased to be handing over to Able Technology “because their experience and reputation guarantee our customers will receive exceptional leadership, services and support.”

The ‘new’ Able Technology will be headed by Carl Penwarden who has joined the company from his previous role as Marketing and Product Development Manager at CityLink.

Carl says, “We are very excited about the capabilities we have brought together – the combination of ProjectX’s broad geospatial and addressing experience along with Able Technology’s strengths in agile development offers a compelling proposition for organisations seeking innovative web applications.”

Members of ProjectX’s team joined Able Technology in early July and will continue to support their existing clients. All staff are located together at Able Technology’s Wellington-based office.

About Able Technology

Able Technology specialises in cloud-based software development and consulting. In addition to their loyal customer base, Able Technology is also the developer of SAAS share portfolio management service, ShareSight.

About ProjectX

ProjectX, an award winning software services company, specialised in online maps development and data visualisation. Recognised by the Open Source Society for its use and contribution to Open Source in business, ProjectX has lead modern technologies such as HTML5.

For More Information:
Contact: Carl Penwarden, 021 222 6848

We at ZoomIn joined the internet blackout last week, along with many others.

The recent news of the delay of Section 92A is good news. We have now removed our “dark maps” as the black out has ended. Thank you all for your comments as well as participation in the blackout.

We’re working with Zawadzki Limited to bring a high level seminar on “Using Google Maps”. The seminar is in Wellington on Friday 26th September 8:30am to 10:30am. The event is free, but you will need to register for the event.

Here is the overview for the seminar:

Using Google Maps

Google Maps is a great tool for making the data you already hold more accessible to your staff, your customers, or the public. Using Google Maps as your platform, you can:

	make it easy for all your staff to benefit from the geospatial information you already maintain
	link information stores to Maps and help users find and interpret information faster
	engage your public with interactive Maps-based applications

In this two hour session we will cover:

• What types of information can be presented using Google Maps

• How to use Google Maps to visualise your existing information sets

• How to augment your systems with Google Maps as a front-end

• Examples of effective use of Google Maps
  

• What is involved in piloting your first Google Maps application and common pitfalls
  

• Licensing for Google Maps and differences between the Free, Premiere and Enterprise versions

This part II of my audit of New Zealand Homepages (Part I looked at the top 75 homepages in New Zealand).

I have conduct an audit of 320 Government websites looking at their web performance. The audit was conducted by using YSlow to analyse the download performance of the homepage of a Government website. The list of government websites was taken from the New Zealand Government website. Full results are available from this Google Spreadsheet. Audit conducted on Tuesday Night 20th May 2008.

Audit Findings

Homepage Size

Graph of NZ Government Home page sizes

(Click on the graph to view values)

• The average homepage size was 216.85K (Compared to 304.5K for top 75 NZ websites) The largest Homepage was staggering 2442K and the smallest homepage was 8.3K,

Web Compression

Graph of Web compression usage on Government webpages

• 84.1% of Government homepages were not compressed, 11.6% are compressing some of the page elements and only 4.4% (14 sites) are fully compressing their pages.
• Some sites are compressing only CSS and JS files but NOT their base HTML
• A lot of sites have compression external javascript eg. Google Analytics (which was discounted as being part of the site) This highlights that all external javascript should be compressed.

Other findings

• The worst site had 151 files for their homepage and the best site 3 files
• The worst offending pages had over 21 Javscript files and the worst offender for the number of CSS files was 40.
• Some sites have duplicate versions of scripts running. One site had 4 Google analytic scripts running.

Tables

Top 10 best Government homepages ranked by YSlow

Top 10 worst Government homepages ranked by YSlow

Top 10 smallest Government homepages by size

Top 10 largest Government homepages by size

We’ve been working with one of clients on marker performance. The problem with markers is they take a long time to load up especially when you add a lot of makers eg. over 100 markers. The performance gets worse when you add polygons or polylines to the map and as you add or remove layers to the map

One of the problems is that the marker class is full of features – Info Windows, shadows, custom icons etc. The browser has to manage all of the DOM objects for the functionality.

To improve the performance, we’ve created a new marker class called GMarkerSimple. The class has a cutdown set of features ie. ‘onclick’ and ‘openInfoWindow’ to improve the speed. We have also introduced a marker cache to ‘cache’ marker objects in memory to improve performance when adding and remove marker layers.

The performance improvement is quite astounding, especially when you compare it to Google.

FireFox 2.0.14

IE 6.5

Don’t take our word for it. Try it for yourself – 100 marker test, 300 marker test and the browser killing 1000 marker test !

I was found this picture on my hard drive showing where all the government agencies are in NZ. We created the image for the Broadband strategy challenge.

I thought it was kinda cool.

Its a big image, a 1.7Mb jpg.

Congrats to Code Blacks, in winning the half-baked challenge. Yet again, we see that as in rugby having a home field advantage has merit.

Lots of rumours floating around about the silence of the judging panel in response to the Code Blacks pitch (except for Rowan as noted in the comments). And we heard that Rod left in disgust after being he and the other judge were snubbed in choosing the winner.
Anyways, it was a fun time, had by all and big thanks to all the Silicon Team, it was most entertaining.

People

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Webstock is the perfect place to connect with the people in our industry. I love the being about to chat to people from all over. Debating the merits of internships, talking about how to get the best out of people, figuring out how we can deliver more WOW to our clients.

Highlights

• Scott Berken – As a person driven by ideas, understanding the mechanics of innovation was great.
• Damien Conway – The stand out session of the conference, he presented us with relevant with a the level of fun and humour that was unsurpassed.
• Dan Cederholm – Flashbacks to past clients saying not enough WOW. He also provide good examples of where Microformats are being used.
• Simon Willison – Explained the merits and pitfalls of OpenId.
• Michael Lopp – Hmmm, How do I find more free electrons?
• Jason Santa Maria – Providing a reality check in terms of real design.
• Peter Morville – Ambient Findability and why search is _so_ important.
• Zef and Provoke and Jimi – What a live performance!
• Mike (the Full Monty) Riversdale – bridging the gap between Enterprise 2.0 (suits) and the web world (tshirt guys)

Full credit to Tasha Hall, Mike Brown, Debbie Sidelinger, Ben Lampard, Miraz Jordan, and Siggy Magnusson. Take a bow, you guys deserve a holiday !

Spotted in upper Willis St today: a car with some interesting apparatus on top, and until moments before this photo was take, a very familiar logo on the side.

Looks like we may be seeing a new view of Wellington streets on the web some time soon, and we’ve heard that similar vehicles are cruising the streets of Christchurch as well.

VS

We’ve created a fun Xmas game Santa vs the Grinch using ZoomIn maps – santa.projectx.co.nz . Find out who will win this Xmas showdown, Santa or the Ginch? Collect more gifts than the Grinch to win the game. Complete the 10 levels and put your name on the high score table.

Have fun!

Kudo’s to Tim who created the game.

Everyone at ProjectX would like to wish you a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!