Google Santa Tracker | Hacker News Reader

Google Santa Tracker

google.com

Google was the map provider for NORAD's Santa Tracker (http://www.noradsanta.org/en/track.html) for the past five years.

This year, NORAD went with Bing. (http://searchengineland.com/this-year-norad-tracks-santa-wit...)

The official word? "This year, NTS and Google mutually agreed to go in new directions, and we are excited to welcome a number of new contributors, to include Microsoft, Windows Azure, Bing, and iLink-systems, among others, to help us in our mission of tracking Santa. The ability to work with a diverse team of contributors is fundamental to the NTS mission, and we appreciate all of the continued support of all contributors."

A tech question: I'm a Opera user and notice that a lot of websites just don't work in Opera lately. Now I wonder what special Javascript is required for a page like the Santa Tracker that Opera doesn't support. Because I don't get why a simple animation used in the clock for example doesn't work. Is this a developers problem for using unsupported Javascript or is Opera having big issues keeping there browser up to date?

Edit: I noticed that Opera is altering the Javascript by inserting a "browser.js" file.

Damn, that's a shame. (I'm one of the engineers who worked on this site)

We've been working really hard to get this out there - but unfortunately I haven't had a chance to test on Opera. What version of Opera, and what OS are you running? I'd like to make sure this works for as many people as possible.

edit: Looks like our SCSS mixin didn't generate the Opera specific prefixes. We'll try to get that updated in the next couple days :-)

How many people actually worked on this project ? (just curious)

Including or excluding Santa and his elves?

Well I don't think it's a shame when Opera is to blame ;) But thanks for your reply.

  Version 12.11 
  Build 1661 
  Platform Win32 
  System Windows 7 (Server 2008)
  Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.11

Some of the scenes are using 3d-transformations, for GPU acceleration. Opera doesn't support 3d transforms yet. :(

I believe browser.js (and if I remember correctly, browser.css) are files that are inserted to every page containing JavaScript/CSS mods that you set in your browser (either through settings, or in the Opera folder).

Time to switch browsers. Gone are the days when anyone could write one, they are now very complex products and a company would need the resources of google, Microsoft etc to build one. Opera was once ok, but there's just no way it can keep up and hasn't for a long time been a viable browser.

Theres a Kaggle competition going on where you are supposed to optimize the route: "Traveling Santa Problem" http://www.kaggle.com/c/traveling-santa-problem

I went through the entire Santa Call portion of the application and at the very end it wouldn't place the call because it's too late. OK--I get that. However, it offered me no way to schedule the call for later or to save my progress! Be warned!

I suppose it's kid-themed, but having the words appear one by one (like Santa is actually typing) is incredibly irritating. The lack of a save function would be bearable if the words appeared all at once.

They actually say it's not for kids!

Nice work Googlers - Now for the Nexus 7 I so deserve for being a good boy this year, can I please have it in black and in its original box so it doesn't get damaged when Santa comes down my chimney. Thx.

That's pretty awesome. There are games and everything. I wonder if this was built by google employees with their "20 percent time".

absolutely wonderful stuff! how the heck do you get a job doing this stuff :-)

does it use parallax scrolling ?

Join Google Developer Relations: https://developers.google.com/jobs/

Yes, the parallax effect is really cool! There are some really interesting aspects to it (performance), which we will talk about early next year, once we've had a break.

Interesting how google chrome can't 'find' noradsanta.org (but if you type in the full www.noradsanta.org it works).

It has nothing to do with Google Chrome - same issue happens with IE. This is a faulty DNS configuration of the site.

chrome does a good job of finding other sites that are mis-typed- it switches to search mode. Not for this one, though.

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