16
Hi Jo?o

Yes, that's the sort of thing I mean - it's used a lot by horary astrologers such as myself, where the interpretation focus leans heavily on recognition of houses (i.e., planets in houses) and house cusps. It is also the more traditional way of dividing astrological charts.

And yes, feel free to email me on that address.

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jventura wrote:isn't the chart wheel being rendered inside the PDF?
Oh sorry it is, I didn't realise the PDF had the SVG, I thought there was a webpage with it.
Well, to be honest to all other developers and their applications, most of them create charts that scale well in the applications, because they are just drawing circles and lines, and that scales usually fine if you are using a graphics library which handles it for you. But the problem is the export, because they can only export them in bitmap formats such as PNG's, JPG's, etc.
I have to say I disagree a little with this, one of my minor issues with sites as they exist today is that they only show the chart as a PNG (etc) but if you try to, say, zoom in, the image will get blurry. This is particularly a problem when I view sites on my phone - unlike Deb, I use my phone a lot. When sites, like astro.com, make the chart fit to the width of my screen, it can make it hard to zoom in, and when you do zoom in, you lack the crystal clarity of a vector.
I've solved somewhat that problem by exporting to SVG. SVG is a vector based format, and so it scales fine either up or down.
Right! That's what I've been doing too. I thought it was such a simple concept it seemed impossible to me that nobody was doing it, so I'm glad someone is doing it at least!
Reaching production-ready is hard, even more for me with the level I'm trying to impose to myself. But whatever you implement, if it's good, don't let anything stopping you from sharing it.
I may share it privately, I have no real plans to release it publicly though. Really it was just for me to calculate things that I wanted, in a manner that I wanted. However having seen this application you're building, I may well just go with this, because we seem to share a desire for clean simple graphics, uncluttered UI, and responsive scaling depending on device.
By the way, are you in Computer Science also? I see we share the same view for design simplicity.. :)
Yes, but my bachelors was actually in design, not in computer science, but I work as a web developer now having changed to development rather than design straight after university.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing" - Socrates

https://heavenlysphere.com/

18
Paul wrote:I have to say I disagree a little with this, one of my minor issues with sites as they exist today is that they only show the chart as a PNG (etc) but if you try to, say, zoom in, the image will get blurry. This is particularly a problem when I view sites on my phone - unlike Deb, I use my phone a lot. When sites, like astro.com, make the chart fit to the width of my screen, it can make it hard to zoom in, and when you do zoom in, you lack the crystal clarity of a vector.
Hi Paul,

we agree on this one! I was talking only about native applications and not web sites. If you use a graphics library in a native application you will use its vector function calls (lines/circles/drawText/etc). But then you won't be able to export those vector function calls to SVG because most of those graphics libraries don't care about SVG, so you must export a rendered bitmap.
Paul wrote: Right! That's what I've been doing too. I thought it was such a simple concept it seemed impossible to me that nobody was doing it, so I'm glad someone is doing it at least!
Most astrology applications out there are quite dated and only work for Windows. If you only develop for one platform, you don't need to care about standards and inter-operability, so you don't need SVGs and platform-independence. For multi-platform, you must use frameworks like Qt (if native) or the web. I chose web tools (although I can deploy them in a native environment, not only the browser).

I could also generate server-side PNGs (as I have done with my previous skyPlux webapp), but doesn't solve the bluriness (even worse because I now have a retina macbook) and imposes a weight on my server. So now I send an SVG to the client and let the client do the rendering itself. And I'll eventually reach a solution where I just send a JSON with the ephemeris data, and let the client generate and render the SVG (through client-side templating, for instance)..
Paul wrote:However having seen this application you're building, I may well just go with this, because we seem to share a desire for clean simple graphics, uncluttered UI, and responsive scaling depending on device.
Oh God, now I feel the pressure to do something minimally good.. :)
Paul wrote:Yes, but my bachelors was actually in design, not in computer science, but I work as a web developer now having changed to development rather than design straight after university.
Design hein? Just what I've been fighting these last months with.. :) Curiously enough, I've been finding too many references to web designers switching to web development (like this, this and this). I have always been a developer only, but it seems something is changing on the web, maybe because of the standards?!


Jo?o Ventura

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jventura wrote:So now I send an SVG to the client and let the client do the rendering itself. And I'll eventually reach a solution where I just send a JSON with the ephemeris data, and let the client generate and render the SVG (through client-side templating, for instance)..
Right, that's exactly what I'm doing with my project for University. I send the request via AJAX, and return JSON with the positional data I need (further data can be retrieved by subsequent AJAX requests), and then the chart is rendered client side and draw it in SVG.

I had sort of wondered why nobody either had thought of doing it like that before, or if it was just because nobody bothered. I have to say it makes me feel better knowing someone somewhere is at least creating professional software with modern web approaches. (no pressure!!)
I have always been a developer only, but it seems something is changing on the web, maybe because of the standards?!
For me it was just a matter of preference, I just preferred it to design.

Best of luck with the software, I look forward to when it goes live!!
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing" - Socrates

https://heavenlysphere.com/

20
Hello everyone,

lately I have been very busy rewriting some old source code for Elements, my new application. Since some of the code was on the Primary Directions module, I took the chance to rewrite an article that I wrote previously.

This article talks about Diurnal and Nocturnal arcs, and presents a simple method for calculating them. Diurnal and nocturnal arcs are essential for the calculation of Primary Directions.

The article is somewhat technical and I believe it will appeal mostly for astrologers that like to know the "technicalities" behind the methods. It is relevant also for people writing their own software, or for other commercial astrology software developers.

You can find the article at http://blog.flatangle.com/2014/diurnal-nocturnal-arcs/.

After this article I will republish another one which presents also a simpler (and correct) method for calculating Primary Directions. I will then inform here when I publish the article.


Jo?o Ventura

21
Hi there,

following the previous article about Diurnal and Nocturnal arcs, I've rewritten and republished another article which presents a simpler approach for calculating Primary Directions. Primary Directions, as you may know, are one of the most powerful and renowned methods for astrology forecasting.

Similarly to the previous, this article is quite technical and I think it will appeal mostly for those astrologers that like to know the math behind the methods they use.

You can find the article at http://blog.flatangle.com/2014/primary- ... ns-simple/.


Jo?o Ventura
Flat Angle - http://www.flatangle.com/

23
Dear all,

sometimes in life things do not work as we hope and we have to adapt. Software tools for traditional astrologers is a very small market, and by my numbers, it would hardly ever turn into a profitable business.

Therefore I decided to pivot this project: Flatangle is now aimed at the dissemination of traditional astrology best practices. I will provide astrology consultancy and reports as commercial services, and software tools will remain, for the most part, free.

This means that software tools such as Charts and Flatlib can continue to be used without restrictions. There aren't many traditional astrology tools out there.

Finally, one of the main purposes with Flatangle has always been to build software tools for statistical research on astrology. I hope that open-source tools such as Flatlib will be used someday for some interesting research.


Regards,
Jo?o Ventura

PS: Don't forget to check the new website (http://flatangle.com/).
PS#2: I wrote a blog post about this new start which explains it in greater detail (http://flatangle.com/blog/2015/a-new-start/).

Image

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You've found a way to offer both a high-quality, freely available chart calculation resource for traditional astrologers, and a means to support your ongoing work. Kudos and best wishes. Your website is beautiful and informative.

25
jventura wrote:Dear all,

sometimes in life things do not work as we hope and we have to adapt. Software tools for traditional astrologers is a very small market, and by my numbers, it would hardly ever turn into a profitable business.
I'm sorry to hear this. I started developing around 1996 because the main companies (Cosmic Patterns, Astrolabe and Esoteric Technologies) weren't willing to include the techniques we found in the Project Hindsight translations. They're still way behind on including these in the workhorse programs (like Solar Fire) and many of those that do, do so in a superficial way that makes it difficult to see the relevance of the technique (and I fear many potential students have been turned away because of this). And now it seems that many of those originally involved in the project have stopped being vocal about traditional techniques or they've fragmented off into their own unique directions (or they failed to generate the kind of excitement that Robert Schmidt did around 2005 with the "Hellenistic" label). In addition to this there has been long standing opposition coming from the psychological camp who've not studied enough classical philosophy to understand that material causation solves the problem of excessive fatalism. The goal of the project from the beginning was to bring these old and buried ideas back into the modern world.

Another problem with developing software in the traditional area is that most have no idea of what they're doing (they don't know how to read decennials, lunar quarters, what to do with the kurios and oikodespotes and various lots, etc). So your idea of education is an important one. I think there will be a resurgence in medieval astrology in the near future. Ben Dykes, PhD has been doing some excellent work in this area.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

27
Hello everyone,

I am pleased to inform you of my latest venture with Flatangle: Traditional Astrology reports.

Starting today, temperament reports are available for purchase at http://flatangle.com/products/reports/. They include the calculation and the analysis of the temperament protocol.

In the near future I will extend the capabilities of the reports, always focusing on the pragmatism that is typical of Traditional Astrology.

You can find some samples at:
- English: http://flatangle.com/static/files/tempe ... ama_en.pdf
- Portuguese: http://flatangle.com/static/files/tempe ... ama_pt.pdf

I invite everyone to check them out and I would appreciate a lot your feeback (any errors, typos?).


Thanks,
Jo?o Ventura