I've been asked to create a stand-alone site/app that's not connected to the web (all on a local server).
One part of it is to have a map of a natural reserve with a bunch of links that will show footpaths, different animals habitat areas, visitor centres and such.
So there's a map (static picture) and when you click on it some overlay goes on top of it.
At least that's the way I see it now.
I've looked here: http://www.carto.net/williams/yosemite/ but it just looks mucho ugly.
Getting Maps Premium is not an option as it's not that cheap. And the reason they don't want to use Maps/Earth free API is because internet connection is still very slow there (sattelite internet only and when optic cable will be hooked up nobody knows).
Looking for some recommendations as to how to proceed there. Drawing paths/areas on the picture of the maps seems extremely insufficient and time consuming.
I'd need some way to use coordinates to automatically draw areas and lines over the map (and then somehow export that as a graphis file (or SVG) that'll be layered on top of original map simply using ajax.
Will ARCGIS pro edition be the way to go or should I start learning SVG. Do you know some good SVG books/tutorials (as related to mapping)? Maybe there's some other way around altogether...
They do have detailed maps of the area in ARCGIS (whatever format they are in I don't know yet).
Just looking for some ideas, any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Do you know GeoServer? More or less all-in-one, compatible with different types of datasets, widely customisable.
Starting from "raw" SVG and write the whole thing yourself will probably be prohibitively time consuming.
If you have very little data (say less than 50 geometries) that is fixed, you could also use OpenLayers without any backend server.
For the data you could use a OpenLayers.Layer.Image if your (overlay-) map consists of a small raster image. For vector data, you can use OpenLayers.Layer.Text or a OpenLayers.Layer.Vecor together with protocols OpenLayers.Layer.KML or .JSON.
You can click through the current release examples.
I admit that this is not an easy task for a beginner, but it's fun hacking the maps together.
Related
I am planning to develop a hybrid mobile app using ionic. One of the features i need is offline google map. Is there a way how to do it?
It depends on the requirements of your application whether this will be possible. Are your users on "modern" devices A.K.A is HTML5 fully supported? Do your users need to view/edit the map globally, or just in a specific area? Does the map really need to be provided by google? I'll address some issues below to point you in possible takes on this problem.
Do you really need google maps? (Most optimal scenerio)
First of, do you really need google maps? Also relevant: how far do your users need to zoom their maps? If it can be any maps, and zooming is not really of high priority (if it is, including all map tiles will make the app eat all storage), you could probably use map-tiles as a packaged part of your app, and display them with a library like http://leafletjs.com/. The library is well documented, and provides a map-interface for a variety of map-providers. It will be do-able to configure this to use your own local map-tiles. You could include map-tiles for multiple zoom levels if necessary, and limit the min/max zoom-levels to the tiles you actually have available. This will make your maps work offline.
I can't or don't wan't to provide my own tiles make sure that you really looked into the option, there is systems out there that provide map-tiles you could use (check https://www.mapbox.com/ for example)
Okay, so you really don't want to do what I suggested. What are the options now? Javascript mapping-solutions typically render tiles based on the location of the map you want to see and the zooming level. These tiles are requested to the tile-provider. I do not know how to implement this for google exactly, you might need some research on this - I'll try to help you see a direction. There will be requests to get the tiles from the servers. I checked with http://maps.google.com what images are loaded when trying to navigate the map: (example (click)). Find out what url's are used in your situation, we will need these kind of url's later (just inspect the network tab in your browser console and see which requests are made when scrolling in your map). When we only need our users to work in a certain area when offline we could use service workers to cache the responses of these requests when we are online, and serve those caches when we are offline. Read more on service workers here (click).
Advantage: Real offline map-functionality for any tile you visited before (as long as your cache wasn't overflown, depending on your implementation of the service workers, and for service-worker supported browsers/devices).
Disadvantages: No support for tiles that were never put in the cache (AKA: never seen before). Another one: this will only work for devices that support service workers. Might be an option in situations where you either don't care about users using "older" devices, or where you can control the user's device choices. Note that using crosswalk could ease your developing efforts here, since you only have to consider one browser-runtime then: but crosswalk also doesn't support older devices.
However: This solution could be fine for people that will need to work in a specific area, which might be true for the case provided by #vipul-r If you or your users know in advance where they need their maps to work, you can instruct/help them in loading & caching their maps correctly.
If you can't work on either of these 2 solutions, then I highly doubt there will be a way to do it. I don't see any other way to the best of my knowledge.
So I've been playing with TileMill a bit and then suddenly thought "Let's grab some OSM map tiles and make this map really nice!!"
Wait a minute. Oh darn.
I really don't want to have to download and set up my own PostGIS server (or whatever)...
Isn't there anything online I can simply point to that will give me some tiles? I'm honestly not too picky either, it'd just be nice to have place names and some roads and geography on it...
I don't think there is any open Server where you can point your Postgres requests directly.
But there are two possible solutions:
For a smaller area you can create your Layers via Overpass-Turbo. E.g. to get all buildings in the mapview: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/5Q0
[out:json][timeout:25];
(
way["building"="yes"]({{bbox}});>;
); out;
Then you can Export this data to GeoJSON. TileMill can read this GeoJSON file as Layer.
This solution is a bit complex, because you maybe have to learn the Overpass Query Language (or using the Overpass-Turbo Wizard). But it's very flexible: You can visualize every OSM tag you need. But its also limited to smaller areas, because Overpass-Turbo can't handle so much data.
The other solution is to use Mapbox Studio instead of TileMill. It generates the Maps from OSM-Vectordata Mapbox is hosting. For MapBox Studio you will need a MapBox Account and you're limited to the tags and layers Mapbox provides. From Mapbox Studio you can export images but no tiles or Mapnik XML.
So the questions of
Hosted OSM PostGIS connection?
And
Isn't there anything online I can simply point to that will give me some tiles?
Are very different: the former doesn't exist anywhere, for a technical (it would be slow) and practical (it would be expensive) reasons. The latter exists in lots of places: commercial services like Mapbox, freemium services like MapQuest Open, and grant-funded services like Stamen Tiles all provide pre-baked OSM tiles as a service.
Does anyone know of a Silverlight Video player that permits "seeking" to a particular offset of the stream without having to download the whole thing?
I'm a bit new to this Silverlight gig, so will appreciate anything you can point me to to get me up to speed.
I come from a flash background, but I think this may apply to silverlight too.
Generally speaking, It's not the player that determines whether you can jump to a point in video but how the video is delivered.
Generally speaking - If you are downloading the video progressively over http, you will have to wait until the section of the video you want to skip to has been downloaded before you can jump to it. This is not always the case, YouTube, for example serve their content progressively. Also, this guy came up with another solution - http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2005/11/2/Streaming-flv-video-via-PHP-take-two You may be able to find a similar workaround using dot net rather than php.
An easier way to achieve your goal, although not as cheap, would be to use a streaming server. You can use specific severs to allow actual video streaming, where you will be able to jump to various points in the video. I've found wowza quite good - http://www.wowzamedia.com/ Or to use a service like limelight or streamzilla. However they can be very very expensive.
I have recently attempted to generate reports in Silverlight 4. In my problem domain, these reports either need to go directly to the printer and/or the client-side SL application creates a PDF and allows the user to store it somewhere.
As for the report, it's roughly composed of 50% flow text (incl. enumerations), 30% tables and 20% charts. The flow text part makes it slighty more challenging, as proper line breaking would have to take place.
So far, I have tried the following approaches - each with its own shortcomings that make them not so much feasible:
Silverlight's own PrintDocument: technically, there are two major concerns. For one, getting page breaks to work and printing UIElements on it with proper layout is a bit of a dirty hackjob and full of compromises; thankfully that's the part I've managed to get working so far. However, the PrintDocument class always renders all visuals as bitmaps before sending them off; this is not so much fun, if one uses a PDF printer and hopes to still be able to search in / select text. David Poll's approach in "Silverlight and Beyond" [1] wasn't that helpful as well as it inherently follows the same approach and thus suffers from very similar issues.
silverPDF [2]: a barely documented library that requires to do most of the layout manually (the former approach at least allowed me to re-use Silverlight's layouting engine). So far, I see no way to (for instance) measure paragraphs and the only sample with long flowtext uses hardcoded absolute values for layout rectangles. Also, the developing party seems to be inactive.
Personally, I'm now thinking of following an entirely different strategy: simply generate HTML documents. But I was hoping that the community here might have hints for the two approaches above or know other good approaches.
Thanks in advance,
~Manny
Do you need to generate the report on the client, or can you get the server to generate it? Your options are better if you can generate it on the server. Personally, I think the way Silverlight printing works at the moment is pretty poor for report usage (sending each page to the printer as raster rather than vector, resulting in potentially huge amounts of data travelling through the network, and lower printing quality output). I've found the best strategy is to generate the PDF on the server (enabling you to take advantage of a reporting engine), and display it in your application. There are also a few commercial products (such as Telerik's Silverlight Report Viewer, Report Sharp Shooter, or even First Floor Software's Document Toolkit). If a client side solution is really required, perhaps one of these might be the best option (although the printing quality will still be poor). Note that Silverlight 5 is supposed to have support for vector printing, but it's another 6 months or more away from release. Yet another option is Pete Brown and David Poll's open source reporting framework here: http://silverlightreporting.codeplex.com/.
If you want to take the option of generating the report on the server as a PDF and displaying it in your application, I've written an article on doing so here: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Building-a-Silverlight-Line-Of-Business-Application-Part-6.aspx. This doesn't work for OOB applications, but the source code accompanying my book (Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4) does: apress.com/book/view/9781430272076.
Hope this helps...
Chris Anderson
I wonder how the mapping thing works in the OpenStreetMap. I'm building an app that uses my own database(which I will build using OSM dumps using Osmosis; same as in the OpenStreetMap website). I have really no idea how it works. Thanks in advance! :D
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Develop is your friend for these kind of answers. They explain (depening on the page) pretty detailed how things work.
I don't know how Osmosis does things since we are working with osm2pgsql but I assume they are almost similar: It basically looks for certain tags (since everything is "tagged" by the OSM community) and stores it in the database. So if you have a supermarket POI "some_supermarket" that has a tag "supermarket" an entry in the database will reflect these infos and the coordinates. Streets, buildings and so on are only coordinates that get connected when rendering or processing it.
If you ask for the rendering of the tiles/geo-images, there are renderes available that do these tasks. The wiki from above will give you lots of answers, just search for "renderer". They just retrieve the information (depenging on zoom level and your setting) from the database for a certain bounding box and interpret the data from the database e.g. the know that a street is connected and needs to be colored in grey.