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Remember that list I made?
It was full of stuff to I wanted do to this site over the cold and lonely winter. Well, its spring and I almost
finished one of them. In my defense though, I built this and,
seeing how the winter was quite mild, I actually got out and rode a fair amount. So it had little to do with sloth.
What did you do Ray?
I rewrote our mapping engine. From scratch. It required a lot of thinking, which hurt because I am not the brightest bulb to begin with.
Remember the last one? On large maps you would see your track crossing lakes? It was inaccurate.
And remember how the track lines were all ugly dotted-dashed red lines? It was ugly. And from a programming
standpoint, it was sloppy, cumbersome and inefficient.
And there it is.
Whats new?
- Accuracy. Trails line up all nice now.
- Usability. I took a typical GIS software layer control approach - giving user the ability to dynamically
hide and show tracks and waypoints.
- Efficiency. It was designed to minimize the number of trips you would have to take to the server. For example,
if you are viewing a specific track, I calculate what other related geographic information could be displayed within the
current map boundaries and I load this information as well. Then I allow you to toggle it on and off. Otherwise, if you select a
item that is not within the maps bounds, it will prompt you to reload the page.
- Efficiency. Yes again. Each track is generated and cached on the server along with a 'projection' file that
allows me to reuse this map on all subsequent map views. This saves me calls to the terraserver and spares my
servers CPU.
- Prettier. It looks soooo much better. Tracks are nice color coded solid smooth lines. The layer control
dialogue slides and off the screen - and if you use a browser that supports it, it is transparent - which is not a
big deal, but it looks damn cool.
I released this version in hopes of working out any bugs before I continue development. I am
sure its not perfect and that there are some nice bugs in there, so if it explodes on you, please
drop me an email and let me know what your were doing and what happened.
Whats to come?
- Printing. One of the biggest requests was to provide a way to print these maps.
- GPS Route Builder. Something just like we have on the Google Mapper. Create a GPS route and it will generate a GPX file for you to download and use in your GPS.
- Email this Map thing. Ya know, you can to email a map to a pal.
- GPX "Pit". Something to allow anyone to upload and view any GPX file. Kind of a public map utility
like GPSVisualizer - obviously just not as full featured.
I have wasted enough of your time
Thats all. Hope you like it. If you have any suggestions, complaints, bugs to
report - just drop me a line or post something in the forums.
Bye bye.
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