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.
Wow, very interesting. Although I'm on GH every day, I seldom look at the base GH page and so I would not have noticed this for a long time. Many thanks for posting this. The article is very interesting.
I'm not convinced of the performance, I heard my fans spin up when I first opened the new Github.com redesign a few weeks back and remember commenting on it to our developers ("how we destroyed your browsers performance" as a joke).
It's still a heavy thing to add to any page IMO. Which shouldn't be downplayed.
But it is very neat and I still like it.
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:
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.
why is the octocat wearing a space helmet if there are plants growing below it? what happened on this planet to make the air unbreathable?
Some kind of chernobyl event, possibly caused by the ICBMs in the globe image?
What is the octocat standing on top of? Abandoned silo? Or live silo about to go hot?
Alt title: how we made yet another population density map, but this time using all of your CPU.
It's funny that the marketing & design folks keep doing this (IBM in the 80s, Akamai in the 90s through today, and so on). It looks super cool and informs the viewer of very little.
(Full disclosure: I ported a prototype version of my company's globe data viz in 2013 using Three.js - it's terrific! Those folks are the real heroes in this story.)
I watched the animation from Nat the CEO and what struck me as odd was the volume of which Brazil does “activity” at night.
Clearly the USA is more active during the day, as is India and Europe. Brazil on the other hand is backwards. Anyone know why that would be? I’ve worked with Brazilians before during the day so that struck me as really peculiar.
This is amazing! Is it just me or is the performance of Github's globe really bad on Firefox? The FPS is super low for me on Firefox but fine in Chrome.
Looks very similar to https://globekit.co/
I recall Stripe's globe was built using that.
A link to a repo of the actual code would be nice too for inspiration
Wow, hardware acceleration makes a big difference here. I'm on a recent top of the line macbook pro and it couldn't handle it without hardware acceleration turned on. I wonder if they can/should disable the feature if it's off?
A link to something similar (but not the same) https://experiments.withgoogle.com/chrome/globe
Based on the Satellite video it looks like the US is the only place on the planet coding more during the night than during the day.
Related: WebGL globe showing live Wikipedia edits https://umaar.com/globe/
I've also tried to visualise worldwide COVID data on that globe, however performance degrades making it completely unusable.
Great way to visualise the data. I wonder if it will work its way into any plotting libraries...
See also ENCOM Globe, tribute to Tron:Legacy https://www.robscanlon.com/encom-globe/
Shopify did something similar, I'm pretty sure, for Black Friday
looks so cool
When someone puts a video game in-front of me and asks me to turn it into an app, I will be searching for this article for hours.
Not useful, all it does is lag the page and increase the cpu usage to 40% when you have hardware acceleration turned off.
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
ohhhh well thank you it takes me a few seconds to login :d
Alternate titles:
How we broke our home page on your web browser
Why your fans turned on when you visited GitHub.com
We collected and stored your personal information to make a tech demo (and shared that info with Google, Wordpress, and anyone who visits our home page)
Disclaimer: I run a similar service to GitHub, though I am legitimately salty about crap like this.
Crazy impressive. A little bit misleading though.
Looks a lot like the globe on Stripe's homepage: https://stripe.com
They even had a post about it, too: https://stripe.com/blog/globe