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?

What is MapQuest up to now?

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on July 9, 2010 • mapquest • COMMENT

In May 2004, Britta and I met as interns at MapQuest, shared an office, and quickly became best friends as our path towards geoglobaldomination was set. We bragged about working for MapQuest to all our friends and family, received tons of free atlases, and even gave them away as cheap Christmas gifts! Wouldn’t we all?

Then something happened in 2005. Google Maps was unveiled and MQ seemingly made no effort to change. Years went by, and nothing. MapQuest was an embarrassment!!

Fast forward to 2009 – MQ releases an iPhone app. I’m pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t one of those apps where you download once, and never use. I have used it to locate gas stations (needed to fill up rental car before returning it at the airport) and post offices. It’s just EASIER on MQ than Google Maps. Oh, and the symbol used to locate your position? Check out some of their icons.

It’s a minor feature that doesn’t add any value, but this was the first time I realized something was different about the MapQuest culture. It appealed to me!

And today, they launched something new AGAIN, less than two weeks after announcing the new MapQuest.

This time, it’s open.mapquest.co.uk which is built using data from OpenStreetMap! MapQuest took the latest OSM files, changed its style and look, added their navigation, and built a fully functioning map application from user contributed data. Read more about it here. It’s quite a breakthrough what they’ve done with OSM already, and on top of that, they have announced a $1 million OpenStreetMap investment fund.

They’re doing everything right these days!

Everyone, I haven’t worked for MapQuest since 2005 but I love what they’re doing over there. They were once THE major player in the mapping community and they’re fighting to regain some of the ground they’ve lost.

8-Bit City Love

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on July 8, 2010 • game map • COMMENT

Remember the fantastic 8-Bit NYC map we saw earlier? Brett Camper has continued to design and develop similar maps for other cities. The list now includes:

New York
Amsterdam
Austin
Berlin
Detroit
London
Paris
San Francisco
Seattle
Washington, DC

Check them out! I can’t help thinking these will be great base maps for any sort of location-based gaming. Somebody, get on it :)

Future cities will include Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Portland (Oregon), Oakland, Boulder, Oklahoma City, Rome, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Nijmegen, Kyoto, Shanghai, and Singapore!

What can ArcGIS.com and ArcGIS iOS do for me?

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on July 6, 2010 • esri gis ipad iphone • COMMENT

In recent weeks, ESRI has revealed ArcGIS.com, ArcGIS Explorer Online, a new logo, and now an iPhone/iPad app, all in time for next week’s mega User Conference in San Diego.

Naturally, I was curious to see what it can do for me. I have ArcView on my computer but it’s installed on Vista via Boot Camp on my Mac. It’s not ideal and is a pain having to restart the machine in order to switch operating systems. So how can ArcGIS.com help me, the lazy Mac user?

It can’t.

I had a CSV file of local brewpubs I wanted to plot (yummy!), and ArcGIS.com won’t accept it. A CSV file.. one of the simplest, most common file formats EVER. Instead, it only supports:

“ArcGIS map files (mxd, nmf, 3dd, sxd, ncfg, mpk, wmpk and pmf), ArcGIS layer files (lyr, lpk, and nmc), and ArcGIS tools (eaz, and esriaddin).”

Wrong wrong wrong. ArcGIS.com is hardly useful for the average user who doesn’t already have access to pricey ESRI products. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but the potential was there and ESRI screwed it up.

This is all unfortunate considering they had the resources to develop a tremendous product that runs seamlessly across the web and mobile applications, and the ability to create and share the results. Their free app, especially the iPad app, is beautiful. You can browse through everyone’s maps or simply log into your account and bring up your own.

ESRI users are undoubtedly excited over these new developments but the rest of the world, which happens to be quite large, has been shafted.

Customize Your Google Maps

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on May 22, 2010 • google maps • COMMENT

We’ve done a lot of work with Google Maps and are glad to finally see some major improvements being made with API v3.

Cartographers around the world will be super delighted over this – Styled MapTypes!! This update now allows you to toggle features on and off (roads, parks, water, transit, etc) and create a new color scheme for Google Maps. Here’s a nice set of potential colors. What will you come up with?