I have to say, I would have liked to have a lot more time to blog; and more than that a lot more time to work on my own projects. But unfortunately my full day time job keeps me pretty busy. Now it's 2:37am and I'm lying in bed with my iPad and I thought I write a few things about 3D Solar System Web. (does anybody actually read any of these?!)
Anyways, if you haven't checked it out, you can find 3D Solar System Web in the Apps section of the site; or in Chrome Web Store. The reception of this web application has been nothing short of amazing, and somewhat overwhelming! However, there has been some complaints and a lot of suggestions for improving the site, and I'm trying hard to set off some time in my daily routine to do them. I thought I mention some and give you my view point on them (since if you're reading this it's probably because you've been redirected from the app).
1- "Presenting the site in different languages". Great idea. And I'm working right now on it to have it implemented soon. This is particularly important since a lot of users are non English speaking people from countries such as Brazil and India.
2- "Add other objects such as the moons of the planets". This is both very easy and difficult. From a technical point of view it's very easy to add these extra object, but I want the locations to be exact based on the calendar; and so far I haven't found an easy formula to calculate the position of all the moons at different points in time. But soon I might add a static version of them and add the animation and accurate position on a later date.
3- "The calendar doesn't go past certain points". I'm hoping that this is easy to modify. This right now is the default behavior of jQuery UI's calendar widget.
4- "Where is Pluto?!". I came close to getting death threats on this one! Joking aside a lot of people complained about this and thought that I didn't include it because I didn't view it as a member of the Solar System. But the reason is purely a technical one. Pluto, unlike most planets in the solar system, has a high inclination, meaning that the degree of it's orbital plane against the reference plane is not close to 0. In fact it's approximately 17.1 degrees, which means approximating the value to be 0 is not fair. The formulas I have are greatly simplified if this parameter is 0. So until the time when I find a formula that is easy to use and can calculate the position of Pluto in time, I can't really use it.
Anyways, I hope I didn't bore you with these and I hope I'll get more time to do more work on this cool project.
Until then, thanks for all your support, and good night (or good morning at 3:00am!)
Esfandiar
