Last week I launched an early preview of the data that's been rolling out over at Argyle Tiles. There's a good portion of the global coverage already in place, as well as a single-city sample of what I'll be able to provide in most US urban areas. You can check it out via the signup page.

I have been prioritizing client work over this speculative venture, but I've also been outsourcing some of the tiles work to make sure the ball keeps rolling even while I'm meeting my other commitments. The list currently looks something like this:

1. finish generating and clean up some global coverage issues (Finland spot, coastline resolution)
2. start adding basic coverage for the whole Continental US
3. beta launch: provide API keys and documentation for early customers
4. begin processing more popular high-resolution urban areas

I'd love to hear what you think, and would also be grateful for any more leads — if you know developers who could benefit from the service in its beta, please send them over.

It's the tenth Independence Day since 9/11.

Since then the government, the shadow government, the establishment and the suicide bombers have continued their fight against "democracy".

The rule of the people, by the people, for the people. Which people is in a constant state of turmoil, but it shall perish from the earth. So I must constantly defend against terrorism — against believing any mere people should have me afraid.

Freedom is a state of heart. Never forget.

In May, starting to acclimate as a freelancer, I started wondering how much client work and side projects I should consider. How many things should I be working on?

Well, most stoves have four burners. Here's what I set on in June:

1. Room to Think organization — the Tri-Cities coworking group I'm in recently incorporated as a non-profit with me on its first directors board. I may be biased, but we've already got a great start: friendly members continue to gather, and we landed a wonderful location overlooking a park on the Columbia River for our space. We have plenty more to figure out as we settle in, but so far so good and the community has been very supportive.
2. Inquirium client — it's an honor to work with this smart, hard-working crew — and getting to tackle an e-reading related app no less!
3. Meograph client — this has been one of the most chaotic, but also the most shipping-est, product developments I've worked on.
4. Argyle Tiles project — busy bubbling on the back burner, we have my speculative aerial and satellite tile hosting business.

ShutterStem and other personal data management apps are still lingering below (in the oven). There's a lot of infrastructure needed for most of my ideas there — not just technologic and financial, but also building with and for people who care. So it was really encouraging to participate in IndieWebCamp this past weekend, too.

For the record, here's a synopsis of some older projects and writing I started elsewhere. The first three at least are still pretty relevant:

• Making maps with WebGL — this demo still gets praise when "geo" people see it for the first time. I used GPU-accelerated cartographic projection and texturing to animate a shape-changing map.

• Using the REST interface as the JavaScript interface with Fermata — I've still been using and improving Fermata as my go-to AJAX/REST/HTTP library both for clientside (often bridging between CouchDB views and D3.js visualizations) and node.js (usually talking to other web APIs).

• Using a job management system to process geodata — although I'm not using this post's particular system, with Argyle Tiles underway I've been dealing with an even larger volume of geodata again.

• Unsafe at Certain Speeds: Dangers Designed into Django — tips and concerns architecting secure-by-design Django apps.

• Choosing a template language(s) — doesn't actually give you a comparison between current template engines, more of a high-level overview.

Last week I began publicly launching Argyle Tiles, and it's been getting closer to beta nearly every day since.

I'm gradually gathering as much good-looking aerial and satellite imagery as I can, and turning it into tiles for those "slippy maps" you see in more and more web/mobile apps these days. There are several great ways to turn OSM data into custom-themed street maps, but sometimes a product needs visual imagery too. That's a lot of data to host and keep improving just for one app.

It's challenging, but I'm pressing forward because it feels like somebody should. I'll need to find enough other developers/companies who are willing to share in the costs to make this sustainable, but the nice thing about building out global tile coverage is I can start "lo-fi" and grow with whatever budget the service can earn.

Argyle Tiles won't be hiring a fleet of airplanes to turn the entire globe into a high-resolution 3D facsimile of itself, or sending an army of expensive camera backpacks to far away places, any time soon. Maybe someday, but we've gotta start somewhere. For my part, I intend to make and keep this service as truly open as possible. I really want for a map tile downloaded from our server to be yours: to keep, to remix, or I guess even to resell if you must.

For now I'll be starting with existing public domain data. Even that will take some time and revenue to build out fully (and beautifully), but I'll at least be able to offer basic global coverage at relatively low resolution, and full coverage of the United States at pretty amazing detail. If you or a company you know (or hey, even just an app you use!) needs a "satellite" base in their map but their product doesn't fit contractually or philosophically within the restrictions of the bigger commercial providers, please let me know.