Custom Mapping with TileMill

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on August 26, 2010 • cartography custom gis • COMMENT

Here’s something to keep your eye on: TileMill by Development Seed.

With TileMill, you can create custom maps by implementing your own design to GIS data, which you can then share to the public by embedding into your website.

It sounds and looks pretty amazing as seen with their example of the Afghan presidential elections in 2009.

The only drawback here is TileMill’s steep learning curve. Fortunately, Development Seed acknowledges the issue and promises to revamp for TileMill 2.0 and make it more user-friendly. Hooray!!

Not all mapping professionals are savvy developers, you know :)

King of Bing

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on August 24, 2010 • apps bing • COMMENT

In the age where everyone strives to become the mayor (Foursquare) or duke/duchess (Yelp) of a location, Bing was going to crown some fine developer the King of Bing.

If you haven’t heard of the King of Bing Maps Challenge, it was just the most recent of the many successful app contests being held. Winners receive a small amount of cash and some street cred, and the organizers receive a gallery full of apps created by the community in return. Everybody wins!

This year’s King of Bing was Ricky Brundritt with his Taxi Fare Calculator. This app estimates the total fare for most U.S. cities and 18 additional international cities to help residents, tourists, and businessmen navigate around.

My favorite, however, was Ricky’s Data Viewer – another app by Ricky Brundritt. It integrates GeoRSS feeds into the app and also allows you to overlay shapefiles on top of Bing.

For example, if you wished to view the latest earthquakes as published by the USGS, you would visit the USGS Earthquakes Hazards Program and download their Atom XML Feed. Select the GeoRSS file through the app and you’re done!

Customizing Your Legend in ArcMap

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on August 13, 2010 • cartography esri • COMMENT

Here’s a new tip for ArcMap I didn’t know about – the ESRI Mapping Center provides a detailed tutorial on customizing your legend patch shapes: Mapping Center : New Legend Patch Shapes.

What am I even talking about? It’s the ability to turn your plain ol’ legend into something spiffy like this:

The shapes shown in the new legend are a smaller representation of an urban area or lake actually shown on the map. The process is not as automated as I’d like, as there are quite a few steps involved.

If the above tutorial is too much work, you can also choose a pre-defined patch shape rather than the dull rectangle.

Yet another alternative is to, you know, just export to Illustrator. Isn’t that what all cartographers do anyway?