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How We Built the GitHub Globe

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Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#61

Post by benatkin »

nirushiv wrote: post #58
benatkin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a blatant ripoff* with no attribution, and since the opening line is the arrogant "GitHub is where the world builds software", I'm not cutting them any slack. I'm also not forgetting Microsoft's checkered history with open source, or their current deals with government agencies like ICE and the DoD. * I'm not saying they didn't build it themselves. For companies like Microsoft/GitHub, the design is t…

You’re grasping at a lot of straws here. Showing your business on a globe is pretty old idea. Stripe “ripped off” someone too. Shopify was doing this for cyber monday many years ago. I also don’t think the ICE and DoD deals are relevant here at all (or to any of Microsofts’s other products)

That's why I said it seems to be a blatant ripoff. I don't know the whole story but I see a similar blog post (but with a lot of corporate self-agrandizment) about a similar design and disagree with the take that I replied to.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#62

Post by EGreg »

If you want something like this on your site, here are the resources. As a company that built a rotating globe years ago to visualize our growing user base around the world using our apps, I wanted to share a link to the demo here. Being that we did this years before WebGL became available in all major browsers, we used canvas rendering and shapes of countries from open databases. It is supposed to work across all devices so try it whatever browser you are on now:

https://qbix.com

Please scroll down to where the globe image appears and click/tap it. Feel free to switch countries and click around. I would love to hear your feedback.

PS: We have open sourced all this stuff, so if anyone here wants to put a globe on their website, just load our Q.js from https://github.com/Qbix/Platform and then render the Q/globe tool and Places/countries selector tool with your own options. Unlike the GitHub globe, you can also have users click on countries in the globe to select them, and if you need you can pull in the flags, languages and all the other stuff per country.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#63

Post by celsoazevedo »

ylyn wrote: post #59
dpaint wrote: post #57

I love an animated webgl globe as much as the next person but did no-one check scrolling on mobile? Maybe it's just me but it captures vertical scrolling preventing moving down the page. It's a common gotcha when embedding Google maps on mobile. Here's a mobile capture for reference https://files.catbox.moe/e965m9.mp4

Works fine for me. Just don't try to scroll by tapping the globe.

Isn't the bottom part of the display where people start scrolling though?

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#65

Post by iamtedd »

willcodeforfoo wrote: post #17

Pretty clever using the timezone offset to approximate the user's location without using GeoIP. I hadn't noticed that but sure enough, my (approximate) location is in view first.

Eh. I'm in the southern hemisphere, and the Github Globe first appears in the middle of the Philippines Sea. They're just assuming everyone is in the northern hemisphere.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#66

Post by rattray »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #6
lights0123 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you don't see any of this stuff when logged in.

You do, just go to https://github.com/home

Wow, that's a really nice (and extraordinarily rich) landing page.

One thing I hadn't known about before was Github Discussions (beta): https://github.com/home#home-community

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#67

Post by defanor »

UnnoTed wrote: post #15

Not useful, all it does is lag the page and increase the cpu usage to 40% when you have hardware acceleration turned off.

AFAICT, hardware acceleration is enabled here (even tried to force-enable it in FF, on Linux), and the CPU load is still 55%.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#68

Post by tomcam »

EGreg wrote: post #62

If you want something like this on your site, here are the resources. As a company that built a rotating globe years ago to visualize our growing user base around the world using our apps, I wanted to share a link to the demo here. Being that we did this years before WebGL became available in all major browsers, we used canvas rendering and shapes of countries from open databases. It is supposed to work across all de…

Thank you! Tested on an iPhone 5 and perf is fine! Mad props.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#69

Post by nl »

benatkin wrote: post #48
dmix wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good design ideas are always 'stolen'. As long as it's not exactly the same clone then it's fine. Github's is different enough and looks cool so I don't mind the similarity. And as others have commented there is plenty of other examples in the past of global activity maps.

This seems to be a blatant ripoff* with no attribution, and since the opening line is the arrogant "GitHub is where the world builds software", I'm not cutting them any slack. I'm also not forgetting Microsoft's checkered history with open source, or their current deals with government agencies like ICE and the DoD. * I'm not saying they didn't build it themselves. For companies like Microsoft/GitHub, the design is t…

The idea of that visualisation has been around since at least 1983.

Combine these two Wargames movie posters:

Globe: https://www.traileraddict.com/wargames/poster/1

Tracking: https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/216876538281839025/

But sure.. it's all a MS conspiracy to steal credit.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#70

Post by nl »

iamtedd wrote: post #65
willcodeforfoo wrote: post #17

Pretty clever using the timezone offset to approximate the user's location without using GeoIP. I hadn't noticed that but sure enough, my (approximate) location is in view first.

Eh. I'm in the southern hemisphere, and the Github Globe first appears in the middle of the Philippines Sea. They're just assuming everyone is in the northern hemisphere.

Same.

I think the combination of timezone and language settings would work for the obviously problematic cases (eg, Australia vs Japan/China/Asia, and South vs North America. Africa is still a problem though.)

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