With the release of API version 2.67 Google introduced the so called GMarkerManager class. It seems to be an easy way to control the amount of displayed markers in your Google Map, depending on zoom level and scale.
Apparently some good old basic cartographic knowledge is essential, even for the fast living Web 2.0.
The awareness of geographic information has surely increased recently. Easy accessible mapping APIs made embedding maps on any kind of website a common sport these days. Good, geographic information is essential and should easily be available for everybody.
Though on some sites I can’t help but get the impression that a map is just there because some webmaster may thought “Hey, everybody has a Google Map, we need one too!”.
Besides being a good example of how the result may look like when the screen designer is missing, I wonder why they put the search box above the little Google Map. What would you as user expect of a map within the Austria section of an Austrian newspaper’s web portal? An Austria related map, right? Meaning that I can search there for Austrian addresses, places and maybe routing or some other type of geographic information.
I can’t.
Since Google isn’t offering any of this information for Austria, this map search is, from my point of view, completely useless and misleading. Unless you know the trick of putting “, Austria” at the end of every search term you’ll only be able to find “Wien” or “Vienna” in the map (the Austrian capital, btw).
Basically a map is a fairly good method to support and illustrate articles on a news portal. But please dear webmaster, before doing so, define the aim and purpose of the shown geographic information.
BeatnikPad offers now optimized Firefox 2 builds for Macs again, which bring an overall better performance on Mac OS X. If you’re unhappy with the icon and name “BonEcho” you can simply change and rename them in the finder and info-window. To get the browser labeled as Firefox in the menu bar too, you’ll want to edit Firefox.app -> right-click “Show Package Contents” -> Contents -> Resources -> en.lproj -> InfoPlist.strings and rename “BonEcho” there to “Firefox” too.
At the same site I came over a nice Firefox extension: Fission, puts the page loading progress into the address bar as known from Safari. From a usability point of view I think it’s much better than in the status bar. The eye can stay at the upper screen area and don’t has to jump around to see whether a page is completely loaded or not.
I’ve never seen the small animated arrows on Google Maps before when you zoom in or out using a scroll wheel. A good method to ease orientation while fast zooming on maps.
There is a good chance that this is probably one of the most useful mashups ever:
On UseAMap.com you can mark and tag a location, add a short description and share the human readable link (e.g. usamap.com/mylocation) with anyone you want to.
Just 2 steps to mark and share your location.
Simply brilliant!
I wonder how they deal with geospam, since there is no registration, tag moderation or any other barrier to add tags and locations. To me, the site seems very vulnerable to spam robots.
A smart swiss Google Maps user posted an interesting example where SVG diagrams are added as overlay to a Google Map.
Very clever!
Though the diagrams are static and don’t make sense, it should be easy to connect them to dynamic data. The example demonstrates a promising method of overlaying vector symbols and point signatures on Google Maps, only based on a few lines of Javascript.
Compared to raster graphic symbols, e.g. PNGs or JPGs, any SVG symbol attribute like color, size, transparency, etc. can be changed easily on-the-fly, without the need of producing and storing tons of new files somewhere in the server-background.
The example doesn’t work with Adobe’s SVG Plugin, it’s only accessible with Firefox so far.
Once I got the Flickr photo search boxed over my map, I thought why not include the public transport timetable and route search the same way. So now I open the search box, enter origin and destination information and the public transport routing shows me the best way to go by foot, bus, tram and subway. All done with a little help of the “involuntary” API of our public transport company, the Wiener Linien.
Accessing the route search directly out of the map would be more convenient. E.g. mark origin and destination directly on the map and the route search shows you the quickest way between the two points by public transport.
I guess it’s time to register at the deCarta Developer Zone to get access to a geocoder API for Vienna which does reverse geocoding too…
What I really do appreciate about Mashups is the speed of development. Very quickly you get from the first thought of an idea or feature to a point, where you can see your first results.
From time to time, mostly motivated while reading a technology post, I can’t avoid to start playing around with this kind of “quick and dirty” development tools by myself.
So, a few months ago I wanted to try the AJAX capabilities of the Google Maps API and started making this little map of the underground stations in Vienna. Basically I just let JavaScript and the API parse an XML file and overlay the result in a Google Map. To decorate the points in the map, I added a photo from Flickr for each station and linked to a Flickr photo search to see more pictures about this station and the area around.
Two days ago I read a post about FlickrStorm, a new Flickr photo search with some “magic” (whatever that means) from a future Google employee. However, reading the post it came to my mind to link my map to FlickrStorm instead of the Flickr search. Unfortunately FlickrStorm doesn’t allow access from outside, meaning that you can’t simply access FlickrStorm by calling the search with an expression like “/?q=searchterm”.
Once the idea of improving my photo search of the underground map in my head, I started trying a few alternative ways – loaded some AJAX libraries, did some testing and finally got a photo search running I’m satisfied with.
Go figure! I really think it’s a nice map add-on.
At least I had my fun hoping from station to station in the map and browsing thru the photos that showed up in the search box. It’s kind of exploring the city by subway on the internet. Flickr has in the meantime become such an amazing photo archive. I even discovered some corners I’ve never seen before around some subway stations, have to open my eyes better next time I pass by…
It’s hard to wrap up a whole day at Where 2.0 since it was packed with interesting presentations.
My personal highlights of today were the panel discussion “Social Data Face-Off” and the presentation done by MetaCarta.
I think this was not the last discussion we heard about copyright of data provided by users. Though it was interesting to hear how this issue is handled by various services so far. Beside user data, how is “copied” data like place names and street names from background maps (provided Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.). Is it legal to pinpoint “San Jose” above a Google Map, getting the coordinates out of the data set Google Map is based on, and name this point “San Jose”, the name which appears on the Google Map and was put there by a third party? Can we be sure that there is no copyright on this data as Di-Ann Eisnor from Platial said?
One way to avoid this kind of uncomfortable questions can be the use of OpenLayers by MetaCarta. They provide a free API to free geodata. If you can’t use Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps or any other available mapping API because of licensing reasons, you should give this BSD licensed API a try. Together with OpenStreetMap it can be a powerful package.
Another fantastic API released by MetaCarta is their GeoParser, which basically parses text for place names them and maps them. I have to try this with our data and studies.
Talks like those about the least cost path calculations doing in GRASS or the raster based demographic data offered a sneak peek into the GIS world for the audience, which is obviously not very familiar with GIS processing and methods. Hey, never forget that behind all those mashups it needs a lot of GIS work in order to build *only* the base-maps. On the other hand, coming from the traditional GIS world, I’m very excited about all this developments going on right now. The growing participative aspect of mapping and geographic information will sooner or later make its way into the world of spatial planning. I’m pretty sure about that.
As Ed Parsons already wrote, the announcement of Google Maps Enterprise solutions probably made some phones ring in certain GIS companies. A big player like Google entering the professional mapping market (additionally to their free geocoder!) will surely lead to some interesting developments.
Let’s start day #2.
I just got back from the Where 2.0 warm-up at Googleplex, the Google’s Geo Developer Day.
It was really great to see the team behind Google Maps/Earth and to meet up with so many other people sharing the same geo-interests. Of course conferences intend to bring people together, to enable networking, but it was a very friendly atmosphere at Googleplex. Thank you Google team!
If Where 2.0 goes on like this first warm-up day did, it’ll be an amazing conference.
One of the best things today was actually to talk to a few people which I only know from certain blogs or websites.
Mike Pegg said in his talk that Eric Schmidt suggested him and Frank Taylor to put photos on their weblog, so that people know what they look like.
But, where would be the fun if we all would know what we look like.
It wouldn’t be possible talking to someone, after a while asking “Are you related to Brian Timoney?” and getting the answer “Hey, I am Brian Timoney.” (the badge was turned around all the time so I couldn’t read the name on it…).
Apart from the social aspects at Googleplex, Google announced a few more things today:
Btw, all the presentations of today were done in Google Earth. A very nice way if you want to avoid usual presentation methods.
Looking forward to a great Where 2.0 conference tomorrow!
Update:
In the meanime the video of the initial presentations and talks is available on Google Video:
Today I slightly modified my Vienna Underground Map. Due to the big European Google Maps update of last week it became clear that some station-points were not where they should be. So I adjusted some of them. The points still represent only the station-”center”, not the exits. There are of course a lot more underground exits than points. Another thing a few people asked: the lines do not show the real underground tracks, it’s just a schema. The lines are direct connections between the stations, aimed to illustrate underground lines.
As default background map I’m now using the normal map, not the satellite imagery anymore. I think it fits better as base-map for this kind of overlay content. Of course the user still has the option to switch between all three types of background maps – normal, satellite or hybrid map. The base-map change made me modify some styles in order to ensure readability.
In my logfiles I noticed incoming links from some tourist sites. Apparently this little map provides some useful information for potential visitors and tourists. I have no plans to develop a full featured public transport information system, but in order to give some more information about subway, tram or bus in Vienna I added a link to the public transport timetable information and routing system.
Thanks to all people at flickr who let me know about new viennese underground photos!