Jeff Croft

I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.

Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.

I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.

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Items tagged geo

  • Blog entry // 08.19.2010 // 4:25 PM // 26 Comments

    Random thoughts on Facebook Places

    As someone who has enjoyed and written about location-based services (LBS) since I first started using Foursquare and Gowalla at South by Southwest two years ago, and as a developer for a social app that uses the “check-in” concept, and as a close friend of someone who worked on it, I was anxiously awaiting the launch of Facebook’s “Places,” their take on the whole LBS thing.

    Places went live in earnest today, and it’s rolling out slowly to Facebook users across the network. It’s available in the iPhone app and also on the touch version of Facebook’s website (tip: you may have to log out of and back into the iPhone app before the check-in functionality shows up for you).

    This is a short list of random thoughts from my first impressions in playing with Facebook Places.

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  • Link // 04.30.2010 // 11:51 AM // 0 Comments

    HTML5 Geolocation with Fallback to Google Ajax API: HTML5

    This looks a bit more bulletproof than the fallback I’ve done on BarStar — might have to switch to this when I get a moment.

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  • Blog entry // 03.08.2010 // 9:48 AM // 27 Comments

    Foursquare versus Gowalla, round two

    A year ago, two exciting location-based social games launched at South By Southwest Interactive, the annual geek-fest that is something of a mecca for web nerds. After playing with both down in Austin, I wrote a blog post entitled A look at Foursquare and Gowalla. Although the post didn’t generate a ton of discussion, it is still consistently near the very top of my most-viewed-posts stats. A year ago, location-based social games were something of a novelty — now, they’re the hottest thing going.

    So, I thought I’d post a follow-up, letting you know what’s changed, why these two games may not be as similar as you think, and which I personally prefer.

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  • Link // 06.18.2009 // 3:34 PM // 1 Comment

    How to Use Geolocation in Mobile Safari

    This is nice. Mobile Safari now has a very simple and elegant Javascript API to the iPhone’s location functions. This means a web app can request a visitor’s location, and if the user agrees, coordinates are made available (just like with native iPhone apps). Very sweet. Can’t wait for a reason to use this.

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  • Link // 06.09.2009 // 8:26 AM // 0 Comments

    Augmenting photos - with OpenStreetMap!

    This is pretty awesome: Pass in a landscape photo you took, and Marmota generates a simulated panorama 360 degree wraparound of what the landscape looks like from height field data. It then matches your photo’s pitch, yaw and roll and lens angle against this virtual panorama to figure out exactly where you were pointing it. Once it’s done that you can overlay OpenStreetMap data (rods, rivers, etc, etc.) right on your photo. Badass.

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  • Link // 06.07.2009 // 10:35 AM // 1 Comment

    Mapstraction

    Pretty nice-looking abstraction API that gives you a single interface to several different mapping service providers.

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  • Link // 04.30.2009 // 8:21 AM // 0 Comments

    The EveryBlock iPhone app

    The EveryBlock iPhone app has been released, and it’s pretty damn sweet. Joseph, Wilson, and the rest of the team did a real bang-up job, here. Love it.

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  • Blog entry // 03.20.2009 // 8:22 AM // 18 Comments

    A look at Foursquare and Gowalla

    Two highly-anticipated, location-based, IRL-style “games” for iPhone were launched at South By Southwest Interactive this year, and I thought I’d take a few moments to report on my experiences with each one.

    First up is Foursquare, a sequel of sorts to the popular Dodgeball mobile tool, which was purchased by Google a few years ago and then killed very recently. The second new iPhone game is Gowalla, and it comes from my good friends at Alamofire. The two have a lot in common, but as you might expect, it’s their differences that are interesting. Let’s get into it…

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  • Link // 03.11.2009 // 9:37 AM // 0 Comments

    Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids

    Foursquare is a new location-based game from Dodgeball creator Dennis Crowley. Sounds like a lot of fun. I’m really anxious to try both this and Gowalla. Location-based, real-life games like this sound like a ton of fun to me.

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  • Link // 02.05.2009 // 10:07 AM // 0 Comments

    Google Latitude

    Google’s new Dodgeball replacement/Brightkite competitor. Looks okay, but I’m not convinced it’s ready to replace Dodgeball and Brightkites.

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  • Link // 12.18.2008 // 2:50 PM // 13 Comments

    New York City in Photo-Realistic 3D Now in Google Earth

    Yeah, that’s badass.

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  • Link // 10.29.2008 // 11:04 AM // 0 Comments

    Ork Posters now has Seattle!

    I’ve been waiting for a Seattle Ork posters for a long time. I just purchased the brown screenprint. Love it.

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  • Link // 10.20.2008 // 7:51 PM // 0 Comments

    Brightkite: Sneak Peek At Our iPhone App at Brightkite

    Took them long enough, but I gotta say: it looks damn sweet. The place snapping is killer.

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  • Link // 08.05.2008 // 3:36 PM // 0 Comments

    GeoDjango, merged to trunk

    GeoDjango is so far over my head that it doesn’t meant much to be, but I hear it’s awesome news, so I figured I’d link it up. :)

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  • Link // 07.20.2008 // 7:08 AM // 0 Comments

    HeatMap API

    A nice-looking API for adding heat maps as overlays on a Google map.

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  • Link // 07.10.2008 // 5:48 PM // 3 Comments

    Where is the Native Brightkite iPhone App?

    The Brightkite team says their native iPhone app will be out by the end of the month. Great news, because so far, I’m not very impressed with Loopt or Whrrl. Brightkite’s iPhone web version defeats both by a long, long longshot.

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  • Link // 06.12.2008 // 5:49 PM // 3 Comments

    Google Maps’ Street View now available in 37 more cities…

    …and Seattle, the 12th biggest metro in the USA and the area that houses America’s second-largest population of Google employees, still isn’t one of them. WTF?!

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  • Link // 05.13.2008 // 8:39 PM // 0 Comments

    Eye-Fi Adds Geotagging Support

    Eye-Fi, the already-cool line of WiFi enabled SD cards, just added a new trick to its bag: geocoding. The cards use WiFi triangulation (the same technology used in Apple’s iPhone) to determine your location and embed the data in each photo’s EXIF data. Unfortunately, this is never 100% accurate, like GPS technology would be (which probably is a dealbreaker for me). Still, at $130, this a is clever and affordable solution to quickly geotagging your photos.

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  • Link // 05.01.2008 // 5:58 PM // 0 Comments

    Google diving into 3D mapping of oceans

    Two words: Hell. Yes.

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  • Link // 04.13.2008 // 9:16 PM // 3 Comments

    Yelp has a neighborhoods API

    I was checking out the Yelp APIs for an entirely different reason tonight when I noticed they have a neighborhoods API. I don’t know how new this is, but I was under the impression that urbanmapping was the only freely available neighborhoods API (it’s the one I use for geocoded content here on jeffcroft.com). At least for Seattle, Yelp’s neighborhood list doesn’t look as complete (or at least as granular) as urbanmapping’s. It’s missing such common neighborhoods as Lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union, and Interbay (I would imagine queries against Yelp’s API for Lat/Lng pairs in these ‘hoods just return the larger regions of Queen Anne, Downtown, and Magnolia, respectively). I’ll stick with urbanmapping, but it’s nice to know there’s another choice out there.

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  • Link // 11.20.2007 // 2:39 PM // 0 Comments

    Flickr Places

    Sweet! Compare, for fun:

    Flickr: Seattle JeffCroft.com Seattle

    It shouldn’t be a surprise that I really like this idea!

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  • Link // 09.18.2007 // 12:42 PM // 0 Comments

    Sprint, Microsoft roll out location-based Live Search

    Nice stuff. I can’t figure out why the iPhone doesn’t use cell tower data for location-based services. It seems so simple, doesn’t require GPS hardware, and is good enough for 90% of the use cases.

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  • Link // 05.29.2007 // 7:57 PM // 0 Comments

    Google Maps: Street View

    Holy shit. Google wins. This is freaking awesome.

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  • Blog entry // 01.14.2007 // 10:02 PM // 23 Comments

    Geocoding My Life

    Shortly after I first integrated my Flickr photos into jeffcroft.com (using Flickr’s awesome API), the photo sharing site added geocoding features, letting members tag photos with latitude and longitude information. Being someone who is obsessed with metadata, taxonomy, and the like, I quickly and meticulously geocoded my photos.

    I wanted to incorporate that geo data in some interesting way here at jeffcroft.com, but the fact that I was (at the time) using dead-end code for this site (I planned to re-write it all) made me hold off until I’d finished the new version.

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  • Link // 10.27.2006 // 9:04 PM // 1 Comment

    University of Kansas GIS Day 2006: Free, and looks awesome

    I’m there.

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  • Link // 09.26.2006 // 10:06 PM // 0 Comments

    geopy - Geocoding Toolbox for Python

    Booyah! This looks hot. Can’t wait to play with it.

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