

Google Santa Tracker - chrisbroadfoot
http://www.google.com/santatracker

======
callahad
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...](http://searchengineland.com/this-year-norad-tracks-
santa-with-microsoft-bing-not-google-142313))

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."

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ohwp
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.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
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 :-)

~~~
level09
How many people actually worked on this project ? (just curious)

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
Including or excluding Santa and his elves?

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SuperChihuahua
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>

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jaryd
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!

~~~
benesch
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.

~~~
benburleson
They actually say it's not for kids!

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denismars
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.

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

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

does it use parallax scrolling ?

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
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.

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

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

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

