ANdroid X5A Telechip HDMI Tablet, 4G NAND Flash, 256M ram; Weak WiFi signal as the AP is far from my room/
Sutherland Shire Map’s a winner
Earlier this week, coinciding with Spatial@gov conference in Canberra, industry associations representing spatial professionals in Australia announced their annual Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards. Amongst many categories there was one that caught my particular attention: People and Community Award. The winner in this category was Sutherland Shire Council with its Online Shire Maps application. It is indeed quite impressive application, well deserving to be a winner. Built with ESRI’s ArcGIS server as a backbone and Flex (Flash) front end it is very responsive and quite attractive in design. Developers took advantage of Flash vector and animation capabilities well utilising a wide range of visual effects.
The map comes with a comprehensive set of data and aerial photography layers. In particular, available data layers include simple “white base” map, ideal for drawing objects and annotating text (relevant tools are accessible with a single click on a menu panel), terrain map with hill shading effects, but also a whole range of colour coded thematic maps showing planning and zoning areas, accessibility indexes for public transport on various days of the week or environmental information. Imagery layers include early aerial photos dating back to 1930 through to the latest high resolution snaps from NearMap.com archive. Full set of points of interests and boundary overlays, such as wards or suburbs, is also available from a drop down menu.
The map has a comprehensive legend for all data themes as well as location search function with a range of search options, including latitude/ longitude. Created maps can be easily printed or saved in PDF format. Access to the application does not require login so, the only downside is that user annotated maps cannot be saved as a “work in progress”.
Congratulations to the development team at Sutherland Shire!
Rolling out a sandbox for Adobe Flash Player
Since this past March, we’ve been working closely with Adobe to allow Flash Player to take advantage of new sandboxing technology in Chrome, extending the work we’ve already done with sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution. This week, we’re excited to roll out the initial Flash Player sandbox for our dev channel users on Windows XP, Vista and 7.
This initial Flash Player sandbox is an important milestone in making Chrome even safer. In particular, users of Windows XP will see a major security benefit, as Chrome is currently the only browser on the XP platform that runs Flash Player in a sandbox. This first iteration of Chrome’s Flash Player sandbox for all Windows platforms uses a modified version of Chrome’s existing sandbox technology that protects certain sensitive resources from being accessed by malicious code, while allowing applications to use less sensitive ones. This implementation is a significant first step in further reducing the potential attack surface of the browser and protecting users against common malware.
While we’ve laid a tremendous amount of groundwork in this initial sandbox, there’s still more work to be done. We’re working to improve protection against additional attack vectors, and will be using this initial effort to provide fully sandboxed implementations of the Flash Player on all platforms.
We’ll be posting updates as we continue working with Adobe to add new security improvements to the Flash Player sandbox. For those of you on the dev channel for Windows, you’ll be automatically updated soon, and we look forward to your feedback as you test it out. If you prefer to disable this initial sandbox in your Chrome dev experience, add –disable-flash-sandbox to the command line.