benno.globe homepage

[Globe in action] [Java stuff] [Ben's main page] [Hawaga]

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benno.globe is an applet that displays a rotating map of the world on a web-page.

It is free for use by anyone. If you put it on your web page, I would be interested in knowing - please send a message to benc@hawaga.org.uk. Several people have also modified the source code, which is downloadable further down the page.

Features include:

• User configurable markers - put any number of markers anywhere on the world (for example, places you have been, places you want to go, capital cities, whatever...)
• Marker overlap detection and removal - if two markers would overlap on the globe, one of them is removed, at random.
• Configurable rotation speed and refresh rate.
• Hyperlinks from markers - a user can click on a marker to be taken to a relevant URL.
• Zoom in to any area of the map

Download

The globe is available for download as globepak.zip (version=2.8) (size=111k). Unzip it into a subdirectory of your website and it should work straight away.

The source code (size=43k) is available for download.

The (incomplete) javadocs for the applet start here.

The land/sea outlines and some marker positions are taken from xearth.

Users of this applet

Travel maps have been produced by: myself, Alan and Robin. Andrew Smith used the applet in a research project to perform Text Mining.

Known Issues and Bugs

If you find a bug, please report it to me. Individual bug reports are available in the bugreports subdirectory.

• Netscape on an Apple Mac - seems to be using a really old JVM, even on the latest version. There are a number of problems where AWT methods that should be defined aren't. Note that this only seems to affect Netscape on a Mac. The latest PC versions work fine.
• EPOC web browser - just plain doesn't work with this applet... can't find the class - I think it could be a problem with packages.
• Problems with Opera (see report #0).

Release History

v2.8, 2000-11-07

Incorporated changes supplied by Andrew Smith: Zooming, clickable rotation.

v2.7

User configurable rotation speed: user can now specify delay between each frame and the angle rotated between each frame.
The user can also specify the randomization characteristics for the markers: Markers can be randomized each frame (as for v2.6; default), randomized only at the start (if the globe is spinning fast, this looks better than the default), or not randomized at all (in which case, markers are drawn in the order that they are read from the config file). These properties are all specified with PARAM tags in the HTML source.
Improved status display - if no globe has been rendered yet, the applet area is used to display progress messages.
Double-buffering has been improved to reduce flicker when redrawing frames.
Hyperlink markers.

v2.6

First public release.

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$Id: index.html,v 1.37 2003/03/24 00:54:10 benc Exp $