This is another tool launch announcement and introduction.
The name is the description, it's points, line drawings and notations, markup tool.
It represents significant degrees of evolution of what I've been building recently, which have been very specific proofs of concept which can be iterated upon or improved upon later.
It's giving you the functionality similar to being able to use a white board, but in order to mark up, meaning, say, you have, an image the basic format is that you enter the path to an image file. Once you enter the path and click the load button that appears as the background of what's essentially a drawing and writing canvas.
This is just replicating some of the functionality of photo editing software. It gives you that ability to load an image of any size, and then it will scroll, give you the scroll bars to allow you to navigate if it's beyond the screen width and height.
And you can draw lines in a very interesting way, which is kind of hard to explain, but you'll get the hang of it. If you are familiar with doing clipping paths, where when you click the mouse, you left click, it's sets a beginning point and then when you click again, a line extends from the original point to the second click, and so on and so forth.
So you end up, rather than making squiggly lines with your free hand, which there's a time and place for that, but sometimes you wanna be a little bit more precise, have a little more control.
So to be able to make very reliable, linear paths and shapes, you're able to do that.
I made a dashboard of buttons and selector menus and whatnot that give you the end user access to a lot of the parameters that, behind the scenes, this canvas element for HTML 5 in harmony with javascript.
I could hard code the color of the lines and the size of the lines, but I'm exposing those controls within reason through a control panel.
So if I could walk through a real world example, to make it more of a narrative here, if you have a photo of a map maybe a site map of a property you're working on or maybe a map of different highways.
If I don't wanna give away my travel plans to any of the map providers, you have to take extra steps to ensure for yourself to sleep well at night believing that it was not exposing your travel plans to the general Internet at large, which happens a lot due to poor security.
I know that if I use any of the route planning apps out there, for the most part, I should expect that information, even dragging across the map, every interaction I do, I have to imagine that they're keeping a log of and if I wanna be private for whatever reasons, maybe I don't want that.
There are very feature rich, offline, open source mapping tools and whatnot, where you can download regions. If you know a region, you can download that, you can run that offline, and you can be reasonably certain that if you selected a wide enough region, then it would be hard to narrow down exactly, your whereabouts, or where you were planning to go, or be.
I like the idea, since that is kind of more of a power user kind of approach for anybody. It's easy enough using this tool, which you can run in a browser, and you can save the file and run it offline completely separate from the Internet once you have the file.
This gives you the ability to just point to local or remote files, meaning if you save a file or you make a file locally, or you take a photograph and you put that in a folder on a desktop computer or laptop, then you can point this tool to that file and have that file be the background that you can mark up.
I'm aware that there are any number of desktop photo editing tools that give you all the features I've created and many more. But for a for me, the exercise in doing the programming, there is a potential that I would wanna use this in a way that doesn't even leave a trace with any of those programs. I've caught them doing things like making thumbnails and putting them in an unencrypted drive.
This is a reason why it's good to do routine clearing out of all the residue of file operations file names recent file lists all that stuff, a lot of applications they keep quite a big, extensive bread crumb trail, and they can even leave all kinds of footprints all over the files.
So I'm liking this idea, and I've talked about it at length before. The idea of the way I'm building these apps, if you're curious more of the details, listen to previous episodes.
But the design concept is that these tools should be stand alone, one HTML page, fully self contained, that can run online or offline.
The whole point of what I'm doing is making applications that do not communicate to the outside Web or to my server that they're being hosted on once you load the page. This one is a little bit of a hybrid in the sense that if you don't use a local file as the background image and you fetch a file from some other, let's say, wikipedia Commons for a public domain image or whatever, obviously you can get an image from wherever you want.
My server does not know, if you had to draw a little diagram, a little flow chart here, it's like you go to my website, you click on this tool link. At that point, if you wanted to, you could save the file to your desktop, put it on a thumb drive, move it to a computer that never goes online for any reason, and you could run this tool in total privacy to do whatever kind of mark up and notation that you wanna do to any image that you have.
My server would never know what image that you used, even if you were still connected to the Internet and using it on that first computer. Once you load the page, there's no messaging back and forth that goes to my server.
As far as what image you choose if it's a local file, or if it's an image from somewhere else on the Internet, that's between your local file system, or you and Wikipedia, for example.
If you got that image from Wikipedia, they will have a bread crumb trail of your IP address, requesting that image, it will load the link to that image and pull it into your browser.
It's a conversation between me and you that ends when you download the file, or when you download the app file in your browser, that conversation is over.
If you proceed to get an image from the Web, from some other platform, you have a separate conversation between your IP and their IP.
It's not a triangle of communication. It's one separate line of communication for you and me, and a separate line of communication between you and wherever you get the image from and those lines never meet.
What I will provide, though, and this is a bit a bit of extra detail, but I will curate a collection of images, image files on my server, that are gonna be pretty benign maps, and maybe sample design, permaculture designs, property site images and whatnot, basically training and example type files where you would be able to download those files from my server, and then my server logs would for x number of hours, keep a log associating that you access the tool and subsequently you chose and selected an image to play with but those images are gonna be very benign and very impersonal it might be a giveaway.
If you're using a VPN and you're in a different country, and then you use my tool, and you select a map and that map is named by what it is which is maybe a country or a region or whatever it is then you're creating that bread crumb trail but you don't have to, you could you,if you're very security conscious, you would separate tasks by time and by VPN server and any other number of advanced techniques, but I will leave that to you.
I have addressed those issues at other times in other places, for now that curated image file options list is still just something I'm starting to think about, and may implement later.
For now, you have the ability to use a local file or get a get a file from the Web, or save a file from the Web to your local machine. Point is you get to have control and unless you're using an image that I provide, I'm not gonna know what image you're using.
That's that's the way to put it. That's the elegant phraseology that I need to use to make this point. So bear with me.
When I go to a website, I'm rolling the dice. I'm taking a chance. I don't know what I'm gonna get. I don't know what kind of trackers are gonna be there. I can try to block them, but most of the time it doesn't work. They can make a fingerprint of my computer, of my browser settings, of the plug ins in my browser, they can mash that up and very easily narrow me down.
If you think you're a needle in a haystack when you're browsing the Internet, actually, you're more like a crow bar in a haystack. If I dropped a crow bar in a haystack, I could find it. I could find it pretty easily. So the point being, nobody should trust blindly browsing the Internet without certain security and privacy measures taken, and then by God for to ever enter private information or vulnerable information into any website where God knows what is going on behind the scenes…
So for me, I think of this as being a chef, or cooking a meal where I know the ingredients because I selected them, I chose them. I know what they are doing and not doing. That reduces the risk factor.
I know the components that go into it, I know the engineering going into it.
This tool could be used for things like private evacuation drill exercises, where I'm looking at a map, and I'm using the color coded line tools to make alternate and contingent plans, you wanna list them out, plan A, plan B, etc.
There for there are circumstances where you would be able to do this markup and then save a JPEG, even if it's a giant file, save it to a local file so that your work is saved.
That can be a private document that you keep in an encrypted folder or encrypted drive.
You could do a lot of course of action development. You could do a lot of planning, and I will be doing a lot of planning knowing that I built this tool, and it gives me a lot of the tools that I would be using all in one or across different platforms.
But I know every step along the way, I'm bleeding I'm hemorrhaging privacy to platforms that probably either know who I am or able to deduce from my browser fingerprint who I am.
If I'm not using advanced tools to prevent that from happening or mitigate it, then I may as well be telegraphing my punches, as it were, in other words, just disclosing more than is necessary.
What's sad too is that I don't wanna mention anything by name, but it's gotten to a point now where there's so many, they call it telemetry, but there's so many tentacles from the proprietary software that runs our computers and even runs our creative suites and our office suites.
If you were a power user and you're creative, you probably know what I'm talking about.
If you can't trust the operating system not to DOX you based on recording every action that you do with every application, every file, every file name.
Even if they say they're anonymizing that information, the amount they are hoovering up and where that lives…
We see over and over again, the biggest names in big tech having massive leakage of the data of their users, not even just by those who are brave enough, daring enough to use so called cloud services, but just you're computing on your local device.
The subscription model has made it so you can't even use certain applications if you're not logged in on the Internet. It's insane to me.
I like to have the ability to use computing power in a secure and private manner and I don't want to be live streaming everything that I'm doing on my computer because the software manufacturers force me essentially to do that.
I may as well be live streaming everything going on in my network, everything going on in my window screens, everything, files, file folders, file paths, everything, I'm not being paranoid, this is just a reality.
I can't get around reemphasizing the philosophy behind this.
To give this tool the walk through, going with that mapping example, or using the line tool to draw routes and whatnot for travel plans let's say, a road trip whether it's an evacuation or you're just gonna go visit somebody or whatever it is and you didn't want to leave a bread crumb trail while doing it, then this tool gives you the ability to do that.
I could literally use this tool to save multiple alternate routes and that is a best practice from the survival movement, a minimum of three routes, and that comes from rally points and training in the military.
That's what the ex military survivalists, which I am a civilian, non ex military survivalist who loves to learn from the actual ex military survivalists.
Well, they were trained to do things like have multiple alternate routes to get to rally points and to have the plans for such such mobility operations distributed among the group or the unit that's gonna be working together to do that.
So if that's your family or your friends, the adaptation of protocols and procedures would be that you, that's why you should keep a an atlas or a road road guide, road maps that are offline.
You may be without service, your battery may be dead.
There could be world war three Whatever so having backwards compatible methods and privacy and security compatible you will be able to use this tool.
You can draw lines, or you can draw dots.
So you can make points on the map. If you wanted to just make a point, you don't have to draw a line to do it.
You can draw dots or points, and you can draw lines. You can choose from, I believe, five to ten different colors for those lines, you can choose a line width between one and a hundred pixels.
You can choose the opacity of what you're drawing, meaning it can be very faint and faded so that you were able to see through it very easily.
That would make sense if you were wanting to highlight. You could highlight a rest area that I wanna stop at.
So those are the parameters you can control. You can create lines. You can create dots or points. You can adjust the line width, which also applies to the size of the point. You can control how faded into the background or not the lines and points are.
Then you can put notes anywhere you want. If you right click, wherever your mouse cursor is, you are able to enter, type into a text field.
Then once you save that, it stays exactly where it was, where that text field was.
So let's say you draw lines around some map point, you draw a circle around it, or you draw lines around it, and then you wanna make notes about where we're gonna stop. You put the note right there, save it, and it's done.
The basic controls give you that ability so that you can have a number of different colors, any shapes you want, any lines you want, you can make the lines as thin or thick as you want, and you can control the size of the text.
You could make art with it, for sure. But I'm thinking for practical purposes, it's about private, secure marking up. It's a markup tool. It's like a whiteboard tool.
Or when you were in math class, if they had one of those overhead projectors where they put a worksheet a transparent worksheet on the overhead projector and then they marked up with the overhead projector the plastic rolls that roll across it, the ability to do the markup, that's the idea.
A white board mixed with the overhead projector, where you can select any background image you want and mark it up however you want.
The instructions are shown when you load the page and you can close that window and reopen it. There's a question mark button. You can click to open the instructions again.