WW2 Daily on the iPhone

WW2 Daily answers two fundamental questions:

• What happened today in World War Two?
• Where did it happen? Show me a map!

New in 1.4 - iOS 4.0 and OAuth Twitter integration.

A lite version version is available free, which only supports today's date and shows 5 daily cards.

Flip through daily cards showing important events leading up to and during the most deadly and perhaps most significant conflict in human history.

Each card shows the date, a succinct description and a zoomable map for the event. You can flip the card over to read the Wikipedia article describing the event.

You can sort your deck of events using two mechanisms:

• Sort by day and month for a this day in history view.
• Select a start date and then sort by day, month and year for a true chronological sequence of events from that date onwards.

The data for WW2 Daily comes from the World War Two Timeline Project. This is a community contributed project to collect time and place data for the war. You can come to the site to browse the timeline or even log in and contribute new data.

The Timeline Project currently indexes almost 300 hundred data points with new entries being added daily. If a significant event isn't in the database yet, it soon will be.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,iPhone,World War Two,App

Ettin

The other crews in C company made jokes about Lieutenant Jordan's tank, it was lucky they said, or haunted, depending on who you asked. The boys in Jordan's crew knew better, they didn't talk about it, but they had all had glimpses of the thing that kept them safe. A flash of brilliant blue scales twisting behind the ammo store. A blinking green eye deep in the breach when they cleaned the barrel. Something lived in the battered old Sherman, something that hid in the dark places and came out to play when bullets ricocheted and shells roared. The old man knew what it was and Teddy the loader said he heard him talking to it sometimes. They sure as hell never asked him about it.

Lieutenant William Jordan had commanded C company since Sicily, and before that, had fought in Tunisia. He had been one of the few to come out of that goddamn mess at Kasserine unscathed. Nobody in the regiment, and probably nobody in the whole 3rd army, knew more about tanks and the bloody business of fighting in them. He was a detached man, not blustering like some of the officers in the CCA, but not kindly either. Some of the men said he had a thousand yard stare, like he had seen too much and lost his marbles. Anyone in first platoon would throw down with a man for talking about the Lieutenant like that. He might not be much of a conversationalist, but if the tank wasn't lucky, then he sure as hell was.

Tonight the Lieutenant was sitting on the warm engine cover of his Sherman, reading a dog-eared romance book by the light of a kerosene lamp and occasionally taking a swig from a blackened hip flask. There was a dusting of snow on the ground and the tank tracks left an icy brown furrow into the field where it was sitting.

The boys had been given an evening pass and were in the village, he had finished the report the captain had been harrying him for and had a hour or two, until the other officers got back from regiment, to take his leisure.

He saw the blue flash of movement at his elbow, but chose to ignore it. He didn't feel like playing the creature's games tonight, he was tired and felt a surge jealous indignation that this brief period of relaxation would be so interrupted. The creature insisted, as he knew it would, as it always did. He didn't hear a voice and barely saw the creature itself, but it always managed convey it's meaning directly to the core of Jordan's consciousness. Something was happening over the eastern horizon, something was coming.

Everything that had happened in the last few months told Jordan that the creature was wrong this time. The Germans had kept up a dogged, tenacious and bloody defence since the Normandy landings, but they had suffered so many reversals and had been constantly pushed back all along the line from the channel coast to Switzerland. They had even bigger problems in the east, the Russians now taking full and horrific revenge for the atrocities of Barbarossa. Surely the last German offensives were behind them. This must be a feint, a local counter-attack to shore up their lines, it couldn't be a major offensive.

Jordan sighed, he hoped the boys had found what they were looking for in the village, because they wouldn't get another chance for R&R for who knows how long. How the hell was he going to explain this to the captain. The company, the division, probably the whole damn third army would have to move quickly for this thing, if what the creature had murmured was right, and Jordan knew it was. It always was.

Mercifully, he was spared the frustration of trying to explain to the captain that he had a "hunch" that a massive armored spearhead was about to punch through the Ardennes forest right between the American and British lines. Captain Forester met him on the road, flying back from regiment with news of the attack already in hand.

"Will ! Get the boys back in formation and fueling those tanks. Looks like the Krauts have got some fight left after all. Report to the company CP when things are moving and I'll tell you the rest."

With that, he slammed his hand into the door of the jeep and careened down the road, tires sending up plumes of muddy ice. Peering after him for a moment, Jordan shook his head, stomped on the gas of his own jeep, speeding off in the opposite direction. He would pick up his boys first, he might need their help persuading some of the other C company men that leave was canceled.

I would like to finish this story some day ...

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Stories,World War Two

Timeline Project Trilogy

I have set up the third and final (for a while at least) of the sites devoted to geographical and chronological mapping of historical conflicts. Not that I need an additional time sink but the compulsion to add an American Civil War Project was irresistible.

That fact that I now have a Trilogy of sites is purely coincidental. My nauseatingly sycophantic obsession with StackOverflow can only go so far ... hmmm

Anyway, I have three projects ready for user contribution. Although I quite enjoy doing the research and populating data points myself, I do occasionally, quietly hope that some generous denizen of the Internetz will log in and contribute their valuable time to one of my three digital offspring:

• The World War Two Timeline Project
• The Napoleonic Wars Timeline Project
• The American Civil War Timeline Project

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,World War Two,Napoleonic Wars,American Civil War

August 1940

I have alternatively made progress and had setbacks in the last few days. First the progress:

I am finding the new interface really streamlined for creating content and have finished entering data points up to August 1940 in Europe. The battle for France has ended, the Italians have entered the war and the Battle of Britain has just begun, it is a fascinating period to be reading about. I would love to get hold of a book on the Battle of Britain to improve the geographical data I have entered for the various phases of that conflict.

The setbacks:

First I discovered that the datapoint creation form was badly broken in Internet Explorer 7. Fixing this will involve a painstaking process of elimination to find the CSS at the root of the problem. I then discovered that the main Timemap interface was broken on all versions of IE, this is a much more serious. I haven't had a chance to investigate yet, but I am confident that this problem will not be too complicated to resolve.

Update : The second problem with the main interface is fixed now. Turns out I was generating some invalid JSON for polyline type markers on the map. Now I just have to fix up entry creation interface for IE7.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,World War Two

Timeline Project Developer Diary

Now that the content creation interface is getting more mature, I have decided to go back to entering data for the site. There are a couple of good reasons to do this:

• Populating a quality data set is the fundamental reason that I started the project.
• Eating my own dog food is a great way to find problems with the UI.

Unsurprisingly, apart from entering some more data for the Battle of France, I found a few problems with the UI that I have tried to address:

GeoCoding AJAX in the UI

Often (but obviously not always) new datapoints have a pretty easy to find location. London for De Gaulle's first radio address after the fall of France or Paris for the German occupation of that city in June 1940. I found myself switching to Wikipedia to look up those locations, finding the coordinates and then copy/pasting them into the text boxes in the UI. This was pretty clumsy and I realized I could just do the lookup myself using the Google GClientGeocoder. I have added a search box so that a user can type in a name, do a search and update the latitude, longitude accordingly. I love how this turned out and it really streamlines datapoint creation process:

Check for duplicates

I have a text file of data points that I had created early on in the project (and was previously importing into the database with a Python script). I have been slowly going through that file, using the UI to enter the data. I haven't been to careful about keeping track of where I was up to and have consequently entered a couple of data points twice. This was pretty annoying and I realized a simple solution to the problem would be an AJAX based check for duplicates as soon as you enter a start and end date. This was inspired mostly by what Stack Overflow does when you create a new question:

Implementing this feature involved a bit of learning curve to understand how the MooTools Request object worked, but in the end it was pretty straight forward.

Permalink - Comments - Tags: Development,World War Two,Napoleonic Wars

[First Page] [Prev] Showing page 1 of 3 pages [Next] [Last Page]