Terra Bella

[dbcurtis]

Is there a readable version of the web site that doesn't have obnoxious scrolling? Someone needs to tell their designers about the Principle of Least Surprise. I'll look at this after they fix this so it doesn't give me a headache.

[iconjack]

I normally frown upon people getting too hung up on page design on HN, but this one I gotta admit is a real WTF'er. When you "scroll" down, it's doing page loads, and filling up browser history. Back back back back back back. Worse still, you think you've backed through all those page loads, and you find out it's one of those sites that keeps you from backing out of their site! We used to call this "breaking the back button" and Google used to discourage it.

[cpeterso]

How does an unusable page like this even pass preliminary design review? Perhaps the page works well on the 16-core desktop computers with giant monitors common in the ivory tower.

[Raphmedia]

There: http://pastebin.com/raw/kYpdLgYg

[ACow_Adonis]

Jesus google. Politely: get your shit together before putting the webpage up.

Forget whether it breaks the back button. I'm going to say it again because apparently companies need it repeated: scrolling is annoying in itself, but I can't scroll without it breaking.

I scroll down, ok.

Wait, did a menu just appear at the top of my screen out of nowhere?

I keep scrolling down...

I scroll back up... wait a second...there's all these other pages I'm viewing now that I've never even seen before on the way down...what happened?

Ok, those little nav button things on the right hand side of my screen? Well apparently, I can't actually scroll to the bottom one...it just never gets there.

Wait no, I can get to the bottom one, if i start on the top one and scroll down, because apparently that makes me skip the other middle two buttons somehow, but if i click on the middle two buttons and scroll down, although i hit the bottom of the page, it still says i'm not at the bottom of the third nav-button. "What's going on?" i say to myself... Holy cow, wait...there's two nav buttons...a bar on the top and dots on the side?

All right, screw this, its broken, i'll just refresh and start from the beginning...oh no...refresh didn't bring me back to the beginning at all because I'm not actually on the original URL...

Sweet mercy...university lecture material example of how NOT to do a webpage anyone? And a google product at that?

What happened google?

Edit: and the bugs keep piling up the more I look at it, your Terabella link in the top left, not only does it duplicate the links in the other two navigation panes, but it doesn't work! It's taken me to two separate screens now!

Sorry, I'm in an angry mood today, but seriously...

[choward]

This fad has got to stop.

[ocdtrekkie]

The worst part was trying to Back. Just scrolling actually adds a bunch of URLs to your back queue, so when you want to back out of the URL, you end up hitting back like ten times. :/

I suppose New Tab would be my best friend here so I can just X it, but weird abuse of basic browser functionality should be shamed.

[chejazi]

If you try using your browser's scrollbar their js fights back too...

[owenwil]

I was surprised too -- I have the high-end 15" Retina MacBook with dedicated graphics and I couldn't get the page to perform after scrolling past the first part at all. It was slow, laggy and kept dropping frames. Very odd. Cool site, but it appears it isn't working as intended, as my dedicated graphics kept turning on and off.

[finkin1]

My guess is that this was outsourced to some big agency that tried way too hard to design something cool and unique. What surprises me is that the internal Google team would look at this and find it acceptable. Anyone know which agency did it or if it was in fact an internal team?

[nakedrobot2]

I smite this page with the fury of a thousand developers cursing internet explorer 6.

This page is trash! I'm sure that there is some interesting info there but after hijacking my scrolling, and browsing history, I just don't care about it.

[sbuttgereit]

At least you got that far... using Google's Chrome to see Google's Terra Bella first time resulted in an "Aw, Snap" crash in Chrome before I got to the scrolling. Now I get there, but not without Chrome's "Rats! WebGL Hit a snag!" error.

From the sounds of it, it would have been more painful if everything worked.

[nilkn]

This sort of fake scrolling also means that Chrome extensions like Full Screen Page Capture don't work.

[gmanley]

Opening it up in lynx did wonders.

[praxulus]

This isn't a product, it's an advertisement. Surprise is sometimes (often?) useful in advertising.

[Gigablah]

Yes, "View Source".

[trymas]

Readable version: [view-source:https://terrabella.google.com/?s=about-us&c=about-history] (paste whole text in between brackets, seems like HN does not support markdown links)

Great content, though original presentation is unusable. My whole computer started to lag, not only the web browser (chrome). Probably Google's web developers use very powerful workstations..

[manaskarekar]

This post makes me wonder about space pollution/saturation.

Are there any resources that talk about what is a safe number of satellites for different altitudes and the effects of space pollution?

I have heard of the Kessler Syndrome, any suggestions that discuss this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

[hackuser]

While it will have some great uses, it also brings more surveillance and predictive analytics (if that's the term) to the world, and chillingly they don't address the social issues at all.

Will Google use this, or allow others to use this, to surveil me from space? How about protesters at this summer's U.S. political conventions? Will they allow me to use this to watch Google's headquarters?

It also concentrates more power in the hands of a few. If the predictive tech works well, how can ordinary people who don't have access to that information compete? As investors in the stock market? Their small business in the marketplace? As a grassroots competitor in a political campaign?

[samstave]

IMO, there is nothing greater good vs mass surveillance that will come of this.

This is an NSA wet dream privatized and privately funded by Google.

Sounds great but we all know what's going to happen with this data.

[btian]

I'd like Google to track down highway patrol cops and integrate it with Waze / Maps.

[trequartista]

Very ambitious. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.

Interestingly, Google acquired Terra Bella in 2014. Even though the domain says google.com, is this an Alphabet subsidiary or part of Google itself?

[swampthinker]

It's actually impossible to use this page on mobile. Scrolling is just locked.

[frisco]

Hold on hold on. This is a big swarm of satellites and (I assume) a forthcoming API and the comments are "the scrolling sucks"? They could have used tables and comic sans for all I care. This is awesome.

Though Planet Labs will always be my first affection in this space. Talk about a hard and interesting problem. This data takes you to so many different places.

[noam87]

Usually I'd agree... but I legitimately cannot access the content because the page is so broken. I actually found out what this thing is from your comment.

[owenversteeg]

Normally I'd agree, but in this case I literally tried on three devices -- two Google Android phones and a very powerful laptop running Google Chrome on a fast connection and it not only took forever to load but was completely nonfunctional when it finally did. I literally couldn't access the content whatever I did. This is one of the most ridiculous examples of a site not working that I have ever seen. If I had not opened this thread I would have literally no idea what the site even was. If I were able I would fire the person responsible for the site, no questions asked. This site is so far past "nonfunctional" it isn't even funny. I agree that "They could have used tables and comic sans for all I care. This is awesome.", but there's a huge difference between "somewhat ugly presentation", "horrible presentation", "unusable for most people", and "a professional web developer with three devices and many web browsers could not make your page load".

Regarding the content of the page, which has been summarized at http://pastebin.com/raw/kYpdLgYg by commenter Raphmedia, I'm impressed. 90cm resolution in a 100kg package is pretty crazy. That they control the multimillion dollar satellite through a web interface is interesting. One clear advantage they have over governmental systems is their ability to do international launches (their initial launch from French Guiana certainly gave them some significant boost of tangential velocity compared to say, Russia, which is geologically screwed.) If anyone wants to see a visualization of that, see http://i.imgur.com/6c9Edge.png

[zzleeper]

I still do not know how is this actionable. So, they have satellites that take cool pictures, ok. Are they selling the stuff? Sharing an API?

[ohitsdom]

Where do you see any info on an API?

[draw_down]

God, no kidding. These comments are a disaster.

[mikestew]

They could have used tables and comic sans, and it would have been an improvement because if nothing else I could have read the content.

As it is, I kind of get the idea...sort of. Something about satellites, imagery, real-time somethingerother. There's complaining about weird scrolling and "broke my back button", which many of us tire of, and then's there's "hi! Didn't know if you noticed, but your site's broken on the most commonly-used browsers, broken to the point that many cannot read what I'm sure is absolutely awesome content." In other words, had this been a marketing page for something people don't give two shites about, the column that holds the abandonment rate in their analytics DB would have to use a float lest the tiny, tiny percentage of people who didn't immediately close the browser tab be recorded as "zero".

So I'll take your word for it when you say it's awesome. Currently, I am not equipped to confirm that with Mac OS X and Safari or Chrome.

[egeozcan]

> This is a big swarm of satellites and (I assume) a forthcoming API

How can I know if I can't read the content? I'm not exaggerating - simply not usable.

[acomjean]

Interesting.

If you like satellite images and some interesting analysis, I suggest checking out Nasa's earth observatory.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/

[adrianlmm]

What am I supposed to see?

http://imgur.com/RXMn72r

[ocdtrekkie]

Interesting, it worked okay on Edge for me. Though the initial splash thing was a bit slow/chunky.

[pboutros]

You're supposed to see a redirect to chrome.google.com :)

[sidcool]

The top three comments complaining about site's usability. The fourth top level comment actually wonders about space pollution. Lets get our shit together, HN.

Let's comment anything, but upvote things about Terra Bella and it's potential applications, because there's no website that would please everybody.

[bobwaycott]

Frontend devs, please for the love of whatever you deem holy, stop fucking up the browser back button and scrolling.

[phantom_oracle]

This is something equivalent to what geo-mapping companies have been doing around large industrial areas using low-flying aeroplanes taking high-res photography for analysis.

It's basically "adding satellite" to geo-mapping technology to "address real-time demand and analysis".

It's all good if they keep this shit near the mining/farming/ports, etc.

However, this being Google (Big Brother), you can expect that they'd try using this for "traffic analysis" (cause Waze is not enough) and then slowly encroach into your neighbourhood, so that when they finally launch their blimps, you can look at the sky and you will see the ads that your browser blocked.

Granted though, if Google isn't/wasn't going to do this, somebody else probably will (or already is).

[lukas099]

It's interesting that it's a "Google company" and not "Alphabet".

[mcculley]

Interesting. I'm assuming there will be areas that we are prohibited from imaging. Will these be limited to areas defined by the US Government or every government that Google works with?

[Bedon292]

They likely can take images of everywhere in the world. They will very likely be limited as to who they can sell certain areas to, at various resolutions. The US government restricts sale of imagery under 31cm resolution currently, but previously it was 50cm. Neither of those restrictions would apply to these satellites which are 90cm resolution, but similar things will probably apply elsewhere. I believe Israel is one of those places with a coarser limit in place.

[jayhuang]

Having worked in this area, I can say you are on the right track. Not only the US, there are many countries/powers that will get very upset if certain people see certain areas.

As for who gets to see what, there are extremely stringent rules set by many of these governments; even within government organizations themselves, there is huge variation in access constraints.

[rmm]

As an aside, I have worked at Oyu Tolgoi and been there several times.

It is one impressive gold mine. IIRC the power station for the mine site is almost 30% of the entire countries existing prodution capacity.

Awesome.

[Animats]

This is Skybox Imaging.[1] Google bought them in 2014.

When, after the long loading delay, a globe appeared, I thought I'd be able to manipulate and view the globe. No such luck; it's just a static-appearing site.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/ZgQZG4WEyoN2

[revelation]

I don't get it, what's new? There are a number of companies doing satellite imagery, you can usually find them by reading the name on the bottom right of your Google Maps view.

And yes, these companies also track mining fields and what not, they just don't pretend it's some charity thing.

[sixothree]

Obviously something is different about this and they feel the need for preemptive branding.

[Jordrok]

Holy crap, that took forever to load...

[anotherhacker]

Can someone either summarize what this is, or point to a another reference?

My questions: How does it make my life better. What can I do with this service, that I couldn't do before.

As others mentioned, the website is difficult to understand (for me at least)