towards kick-ass user interfaces...

i have started to beleive that any information that is represented as text in an app is begging to be shown in more engaging way!

when i showed the user interface of an internal project that i am currently working on (which deals with status of various project across thoughtworks) to rajesh, representing location info as points on a map was one of his many suggestions. it seemed interesting... jude (karan singh) and me pounced on the problem.... and boy it was a fun ride!

we found a flash map that uses a meta-data file containg the lattitude and longitude of the points to be shown... converting location to lattitude and longitude seemed challenging.... finally managed to write a program that uses google maps and some other raw data to retrieve the lattitude and longitude.

of course, i cant display our project info here... but i made a map of all the people in my college gang with links to thier blogs.... u can zoom to a particular location by drawing a rectangle on the map... go play with it :-)


click here for a larger view.

as rajesh said... it will be great if we can generalize this interface to support other kinda maps, maybe a floor plan of our office showing where each person is working.... any more ideas?