"You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!"

Feynman then "went on to work out equations of wobbles" and it did work out.

I'm struggling with no such renown as Feynman, but the world I live in is still rather intimidating.

As analysts ooh and ahh over resolutions and stock buybacks, as the others bring their latest data centers online, and while so-and-so's multimillion dollar attempt to compete with really-is-great's dominant market share makes the news again — it's impossible to live up to it.

So who cares? My career has netted me an approximate financial worth of negative one house…plus a canister of helium!

This wannabe balloon experiment is ugly, it leaks badly, it's needed rescue from the trash once already. No honorary doctorate here. We're having fun:

Spring is here, and with it the wind and my balloon mapping kit!

Probably not the best combo, but dealing with a bit of gusty weather is just one of many things I'll need to learn more about.

I'd long been interested in messing about with something like Kite Aerial Photography to gather public domain orthoimagery. I never quite could believe that a kite would be very convenient for the task though. A big balloon seemed like a better idea, but I wasn't really sure exactly if or how to best accomplish that.

I also have a tendency to collect tools and instruments and spare parts for all sort of intended hobbies, but then they always end up on the back burner. Sitting at my desk or on the couch working on the big "make software better" project is about the only hobby that's been truly habit-forming, so I've mostly learned to avoid "investing" in gadget acquisition syndrome elsewhere. So long as my laptop stays running, I've got all the workbench I actually use. At least…until the kids are old enough to appreciate other hobbies — I've been telling myself to leverage procrastination talent against my microeconomic weakness.

Well two-and-a-half years old is enough to appreciate a big colorful helium balloon, eh? I jumped on the recent "balloon kit" Kickstarter campaign to kickstart a hobby that will require spending sunny Saturdays outside in the fresh air.

I'm still not entirely sure how to "accomplish" balloon mapping, but I've got a basic start on rigging up a camera and have already started pestering the local industrial gas supplier with newbish questions concerning just how I might fill our first airship with helium.

More details as this story develops!

I rode the train in and the bus back, visiting Portland from 10am on Tuesday to 10am Thursday. The weeks before had been busy too: I didn't even get a chance to join the local Tri-Cities co-working group, being heads down in client work and conference calls. Taking public transportation down the river to a very public town was a good reminder of how community matters — both the tech community and the wide world it should serve.

I was struck by how lovely life can be in a town like Portland — warm coffee shops everywhere, so much fine food and drink in every district, and such useful book and tech and music shops scattered all over, all bustling with interesting and amiable people. And how empty a city can still be — the streets are littered with people who have so blantantly lost or tossed every benefit of society except the worthlessness of its loose change.

So I'm grateful to the many people who helped Portland feel not-too-far from home during my time there:

• Rafa from Grafa Geographic Design, Tim and Ryan at Ecotrust, and Justin with Mapbox were all willing to share lunch and "geo" shop talk with a random stranger from out of town.
• The crew sent by Couchbase gave me a warm welcome to their conference tour, and even let me share some of the things I've been working on lately. It was great to meet some other new Couch and mapping enthusiasts, as well as catch up with what Chris and Tyler and Mikeal are doing these days.
• Big thanks to Ben who opened his home (and vintage electronics closet) and Liz whose promising upstart PDX vintage furniture rental company more-or-less sponsored my lodging (and whose husband I stole for not one but two late evenings of epic retro-nerdish conversation!)

Portland's a great place to get offline but stay connected. Though it's good to be back home, I was blessed to visit again.

Time zones pose an occasional software localization challenge. Assuming your software needs to include this as a configurable setting (more on that below), what's the best way to help a user choose a time zone?

The problem is, there are a lot of time zones. A lot of time zones, most without a naturally elegant identity or universally understood name. Time zones were designed be mostly unthought-of: invented so most people wouldn't have to worry about the effect of longitude on time. Within a time zone's geopolitical boundary, there's little need to think or talk about time zones.

As we'll soon see, timezones are very closely tied to location. People may not know the official name or relative offset or exact boundaries of a particular time zone, but they understand that there is one for any particular place.

Collected examples

To see how a user might expect us to solve this interaction problem, I've gathered a variety of "time zone chooser" examples.

Original Mac — circa 1984

Screenshot via http://macfloppy.net/post/18502052008/susan-kare-designed-the-original-macintosh-control:

This is the Control Panel in the original Macintosh operating system. Note how the user sets the time zone: they don't! A personal computer was more of an island back then; a user set "the" time (their time) and that was that.

Windows 3.1 — circa 1992

For Windows 3.1 applications — remember Netscape Navigator 2.0? — a user would set their timezone configuration via a variable in AUTOEXEC.BAT:

SET TZ=aaahhbbb

For interfaces of the "Application Programming" sort, this general approach is still reasonable. Identifiers referencing rules in the Olson database are preferable to the ambiguous local three letter abbreviations and manually-configured offset values needed here.

Windows NT 3.1 — circa 1993

Screenshot via http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt31:

While I haven't been able to find a screenshot of this dropdown when expanded, from the looks of things it was sorted by GMT offset (see how there's multiple cities listed in the chosen option?).

Newton OS — circa 1993

Screenshot via http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/:

The Newton — a PDA that goes wherever people need to communicate — needed to know about timezones. Already we see a map, and an interface based on locations (major cities) rather than the underlying timezones. Since it's somewhat natural to associate time zones with a list of "nearby" major cities, why not use a map to narrow down that list? Tapping the map pulls up a short list of cities near the stylus.

Windows 9x — circa 1995

Screenshot (s) via http://www.petri.co.il/summer_clock_in_israel_for_2006.htm:

These screenshots confirm my theory of how Windows NT's dropdown worked. There is a map, presumably clickable, but it doesn't actually seem to show the selected timezone. Apparently, there's a reason for that.

Mac OS 9 — circa 1999

Screenshot via http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90:

By Mac OS 9 we again see a list of cities as the interface to the underlying time zone database. The key takeaway is that a user is only expected to know and find a nearby major city in their timezone — there may be more than one city listed per timezone. This reduces the geopolitical knowledge (and guesswork) necessary to find a suitable setting. Just because I share the same time zone rules as Los Angeles doesn't mean it would come to mind as representative of my locale.

Windows CE — circa 2000

Screenshot via http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=115&prodSeriesId=322914&prodTypeId=215348&objectID=c00009393:

Windows CE provided a similar dropdown interface as Microsoft's early desktop interfaces (although certain cities were grouped differently). Note the easy affordance made for switching to a temporary timezone while traveling.

Garmin eTrex/Foretrex — circa 2004

Screenshot via http://www8.garmin.com/manuals/Foretrex201_OwnersManual.pdf, p.44:

An "embedded operating system" for an older device with limited screen space, limited processing power, and limited input surface has a limited solution to the problem: a listing of perhaps two dozen or so world cities (…Samoa, Sydney, Tehran, Tokyo…) followed by the named US time zones. There's also an "Other" option enabling the user to set a custom ±hour/minute offset from UTC.

Note generally that trying to tackle the "time zone" problem with only this last option (forcing the user to manually specify their local time offset) would be broken in at least two ways: it expects the user to know this offset which is usually not the case, and it requires many users to manually change the setting twice a year. (It's broken in three ways if you assume that every time zone is offset from the meridian by whole hour values. Only most, not all, are.)

Web 2.0 — circa 2005

Screenshot of http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/:

Here's an example of a web app making use of an offset-sorted dropdown in the Microsoft style.

Mac OS X Leopard — circa 2007

Screenshot via http://rubenerd.com/p2370-2/:

Mac OS X also let the user select their approximate location via a world map, as we saw early on in the Newton OS. Again, the advantage is: rather than having to think of a major city to search for, the interface shows the options near me — I just have to pick the one I feel is most appropriate of the three or four nearby options.

Garmin nüvi — circa 2007

Screenshot via http://www.gpsmagazine.com/2007/06/garmin_nuvi_250w_review.php?page=7

To be honest, I'm not sure what happens when you press the time zone button. The manuals for many nüvi models say "select a time zone or nearby city from the list", so I think it's safe to assume that this updated hardware still relies on the same limited interface as Garmin's older outdoor GPS units above.

World Wide Web — circa 2009

Screenshot via http://dribbble.com/shots/89371-Me-com-Time-Zone-Picker:

Web apps can show maps too. Here's one (kind of rough perhaps? I'm not sure what's going on with the two different highlights…) from one of Apple's ill-fated Me.com web apps.

Garmin nüvi — circa 2011

Screenshot via http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/Garmin-nuvi-2360-reviewed-37558.php:

GPS receivers know the exact time in UTC and the users' very precise location — the device can use this information to simply set the local time automatically. Many cell phones offer a similar user experience — the phone simply displays the local time of the (nearby) tower it is currently connected to.

America-Wide Web — circa 2010

Sometimes you're only localizing for a limited geographic area. In this case, a web app was built for a service only offered in the United States. It was possible to list common names for the small handful of time zones the app needed to support.

Mac OS X Lion — circa 2012

Recent versions of OS X compare the signal strengths of WiFi routers in range to a database of wireless base station locations to get a fairly precise location fix. Like the nüvi example above, this allows a fully automatic time zone setting. If necessary, the user can still override the setting as in previous versions, by clicking the map or typing the name of a nearby city. In fact, since the preference pane now uses an Internet API to look up the city, it offers a fairly comprehensive list including even some smaller cities.

This interface offers a great deal of flexibility, all centered around the helpful perspective of time zone ("local time") being strongly related to location.

General and perhaps Timely advice

Of course, the best interface is no interface. In a few cases — be careful to make sure yours is really one of them — you can ignore time zones altogether and just deal with local times. In many other cases, you can rely on time and calendar–handling facilities built in to your software's underlying platform. If the user's operating system is already configured to display their local time, it's best to use those APIs whenever possible. Store precise moments of time in a timezone-neutral format like Unix timestamps or alongside their original offset as possible with ISO 8601/RFC 3339 time strings, and convert to local time only when displayed. This often works for web apps, too; you can set a JavaScript Date object using a UTC timestamp and get the calendar values back in the user's local time.

Aside: As a general rule you should never, never attempt to handle applying the chosen time zone information yourself. (You shouldn't be implementing any calendar-based calculations yourself, for that matter.) If you would have to change your code or its configuration to handle a local legislative change to any sort of calendar or timekeeping system — and your work isn't part of a major operating system's platform — you're most likely doing it wrong.

Summary

There may occasionally be times (usually when a shared machine needs to interpret or localize times on behalf of a remote user) that your application must let the user configure a time zone.

If you need to stick with a simple dropdown, grouping regions with shared GMT offsets and DST rules and then ordering by the base offset (basically: longitude) can work. Many examples above do this. (However, avoid simply presenting the user with a list of every time zone in your platform's database. Even if you've managed to filter out the historical ones!)

If you can provide one, a clickable map is better. Include alongside a small database of major cities, or reference a more complete set of populated place names. Try to familiarize yourself with the nuances of the best interface examples above — situations where the user clicks near more than one time zone, other cases where the user would prefer to fine-tune the choice of city, and perhaps other aspects I've missed. Accessibility should also be a concern — how will the user choose a time zone if they aren't very good at seeing or clicking?

And finally, if you just want to convert between Every Time Zone, well…follow that link. Or if you like screenshots of old operating systems, you'll love the GUIdebook website.

Oh, and of course I'd love to hear about other unique and interesting solutions to this "time zone picking" problem if you have some!

Late last year I designed and implemented another core piece of any GIS system: the geometry editing interface.

The core part of Metakaolin (a CouchApp for "map documents") is a GeoJSON editing layer for Polymaps which I wrote. This was an interesting design challenge, but I'm encouraged by how it's turning out.

Basic goals

Existing map editors weren't very inspiring. It seemed the most common interfaces were the most clunky. I wanted to build something that had the web at its heart, that was uncluttered but still learnable, non-modal but still powerful.

How could I edit a polygon (say) without having to keep switching between this tool and that tool, or trying to remember which modifier key changes what on whose operating system, or always forgetting to double-click when placing that last point to make it connect properly to the first?

I began imagining, sketching and prototyping some ideas for polygon editing — thinking about how they would translate between mouse and multitouch and trying to figure out how they would also work for unclosed lines and plain old points. The ideas I started with were fun to use, but I was having trouble wrapping my mind around where to stick every action you'd need just to edit a single polygon. Then, how would it make you choose between polygons and lines and points? And compose multiple related shapes into one geometry?

Secret sauce

The "a-ha!" moment came while re-reading the GeoJSON spec to get a handle on everything I'd need to support.

I was struck by how flexible the format is. Each feature in a collection can have a different kind of geometry than the next. There's even geometry type that can be used to nest any combination of point, line and polygon shapes. How would I support editing a complicated geometry collection like that? It basically means the user can just draw whatever they want!

Hmmm. Well, why not?

Why should we have to tell the computer "watch out, I'm gonna draw a polygon!" before just drawing our enclosed area? "Computer, now please switch to the mode where the next shape will have the 'type' set to 'MultiLineString' instead." No! No! No!

Maybe the GeoJSON format isn't so complicated as I thought. Maybe it's simply designed to be invisible.

Embracing this meant the only concepts which people (and most of the code, too!) really end up needing to worry about are just simple dots and dashes. (Called "nodes" and "connections" in the code.) I can move and merge the dots, disconnect or connect them with dashes. When I'm done, a simple invisible algorithm can worry about how to represent what I drew in the underlying GeoJSON format.

The result

My solution is not 100% "intuitive"; with the right contextual tips, though, I think it will be easy enough to learn, fun enough to use, and hard enough to forget. You can try out a live demo — the main tricks are:

• double-click an existing shape to start editing
• add or remove nodes using existing nodes: drag two nodes together to merge them, click and then drag while an existing dot is still ringed in green for a new one
• you can break a connection by dragging its end "away from a node" (move red ring away), or refine a connection by dragging its middle "closer to where it should be" (move green ring somewhere)

Interestingly, these instructions are still hard for me to explain, but they've always been easy to demonstrate. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I'd prefer if it were completely self-explanatory, but perhaps there's something to be said for fun interfaces that trade a little learning curve for a lot of power.

Going forward

While I've mostly just drawn trucks for my kids and ships for demos, I'm delighted that a few others have already used pieces of Metakaolin for their own ideas. Max Ogden converted some of his geodrawings into a Valentine's card, and Brian Mount has applied it to a maptcha experiment and a civic collaboration app called CityEdit. I'm especially excited about CityEdit, as it's just the kind of thing I had hoped CouchDB, Polymaps and Metakaolin's editor would be useful for!

There's still plenty of work to be done. For Metakaolin-as-its-own-app itself, the ability to edit feature properties (and colors/style perhaps too) is probably important. For the reusable editor layer, the overall "look and feel" definitely still needs a little…je voudrais savoir.

Oh, and one more thing. I mentioned it briefly, but: multitouch support! It should be fairly easy to add, as I've architected for it, just haven't gotten to it. Imagine combining Metakaolin with PouchDB so it can run offline on a multitouch tablet with GPS. You could go to a state park, or out to a remote plot of land, or even into a disaster area and map whatever needed to be mapped.

See, the "document management" part of Metakaolin was actually yoinked from a simple text editor I had written earlier. I would love for jotting things down on a map, or putting together a complete geographic report, to become about as easy as sharing "typed up" files is today. I hope that this GeoJSON editor is a big step in that direction.