Ticklish Techs

Today I released the new version of PhotoTagStudio with a very small improvement.

A new option was added to expand the tree of tags at startup.

See http://phototagstudio.irgendwie.net/

Lately I was looking for a way to translate geo coordinates (latitude and longitude form my gps device) to some sort of text or names. As you know I’m trying to geotag my photos using a gps logger and PhotoTagStudio. This data can be used to visualize the place a photo was taken on a map (e.g. Google Maps or flickr!). The next step can be to use this data to describe the photo as well.

I think one should be able to translate a geo coordinate into at least the name of the county, the state and the city; maybe to the district or a street name, too. To achieve this I found the geonames.org webpage. This page collects exactly the data I need and allows searching via the website and a webservice.

The webservice itself consists of approximate 30 REST methods one can call by querying an URL. Most of these calls return a XML document (or optional a JSON document). Unfortunately  there is no SOAP / WSDL version of this webservice. For a .net and C# developer a SOAP webservice is very easy to consume but for such a REST / XML webservice you have to create the URLs yourself and parse the resulting XML document.

I started to create a library to query the webservice. This library provides a few static methods mapped to the most useable webservice-methods and returns good shaped .Net objects. These objects carry all the data coming from the webservice. At the moment this library is in an early beta status but you can use it in your own projects. It can be found on Codeplex: GeonamesDotOrgDotNet, there you will find a small example and a demo application. When using this library you should take a look at the documentation of the geonames.org webservices since the interfaces are nearly the same.

I hope this is useful for someone. I will extend the library in the next weeks. Feature requests are welcome, so is help on the coding side.

Currently the following webservice calls are supported:

• findNearby
• findNearbyPlaceName
• findNearByWeather
• findNearbyWikipedia
• get
• hierarchy
• children
• gtopo30
• srtm3

At the end a few random screenshots and a code snippet. For more information please take a look at the Codeplex project page.

// finding some place in Berlin, Germany
// (using prefix m for decimal literals)
Geoname Place =
GeoNamesOrgWebservice.FindNearbyPlaceName(52.51m, 13.4m);

// getting all parents
IEnumerable ParentPlaces = Place.Hierarchy();

// display the partents
// (will print out something like:
//  “Globe > Europe > Germany > Land Berlin > Berlin >”)
foreach (Geoname x in ParentPlaces)
Console.Write(x.Name + ” > “);

The Classes of the Library:

A screenshot of the demo application to test the library:

Over the time I build some libraries that enhance the Microsoft DSL Tools framework and post them here. I wrote a number of articles and for many of them I provided a download with source code or examples.

However we all know: zip files are a bad version management system!

I decided to put all these code together and compose a single library with addons for the DSL Tools, name it “JaDAL – Just another DSL-Tools Addon Library” and publish it at CodePlex. I will continue to write articles here, but now you can always find the latest code at CodePlex.

If you are interested in my work with the DSL Tools, just take a look at JaDAL.

Today I released the new version of PhotoTagStudio with a lot of stability and usability enhancements and the ability of changing exif time and date data.

Some more new features are:

• Support for drag and drop from PTS to other applications (e.g. the explorer).
• Navigating from picture to picture in the current folder with the PageDown and PageUp keys.
• Deleting files from within PTS with a Button and the Del key (don’t worry, you will be asked again before deleting and deleting means moving to the recycle bin!)
• Since PTS contains more and more features form version to version some of them are now by default hidden. Take a look at the configuration dialog or use the right-click-context-menu on the tab header on the right side if you are looking for a missing feature.

See http://phototagstudio.irgendwie.net/

Since there is not advertising on this blog, we just have to carry out our duty to officially inform you about the release of our first commercial software product 🙂 :

Arisan, an interface connecting the business process modelling software ARIS Toolset (by IDS Scheer) to .NET.

After almost 2 years of development we put up the  website www.arisan.de today.

A quite exciting moment and we hope for many downloads of the trial version. We are very confident in it’s technical quality and think Arisan is a very useful tool to work with ARIS in a sophisticated and professional way.

If you or one of your customers uses ARIS and if you are reading this blog because of it’s .NET content, you should give it a try.

Today I released the new version of PhotoTagStudio with some new features (Copy photos from memory card, Macro and Plugins).

See http://phototagstudio.irgendwie.net/

Finaly i released my tool PhotoTagStudio in version 0.5 and its webpage. For more information see http://phototagstudio.irgendwie.net

🙂