rjcarr's dashboard

RandomEtc replied on September 10, 2008 20:03 to the question "multiple data layers" in Modest Maps:

Freaker has it right on both counts. To add multiple marker layers, create your own instances of MarkerClip and add them as children of the map, and then use markerClip.putMarker to add markers to the clip directly, instead of through map.

To create layers, you can either:

1) subclass a map provider and append new tile URLs, which is discussed here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/modestmaps...

Or,

2) create two maps and synchronise them, which is discussed here:
http://gsfn.us/t/l7o

Bingo replied on August 01, 2008 01:36 to the discussion "Tell Us About Your Experience With Modest Maps" in Modest Maps:

Dear Modest Map team:

We have a tour website using Modest Map, backend with MapServer and TileCache.
http://liuchiu.net/index.php?option=c...

We're still working on it, thank the team for the great library.

Lokesh replied on July 21, 2008 10:19 to the discussion "Tell Us About Your Experience With Modest Maps" in Modest Maps:

Dear Modest Map team,

Thank you so much for you prompt reply. One of the reasons we went with Modest Map is because of its standalone capability. Once support for KML (and other formats) is available, we will have no reason to look at other mapping APIs.

Finally, we also want to thank the team for your great efforts, making it possible for developers like us not having to rely on Google Maps for developing great applications.

Best,
Lokesh

RandomEtc replied on July 20, 2008 19:36 to the discussion "Tell Us About Your Experience With Modest Maps" in Modest Maps:

Hi Lokesh,

Thanks for letting us know about your project. I like the style of your hybrid cartography, it looks really great.

I have been working on two possible solutions for layers in the tween branch of Modest Maps:

1. for simple hybrid layers such as Google's or Yahoo's, the map provider code has been simplified so that you simply return an array of URLs to load for each tile

2. it is also possible to create more than one Map instance, with different providers, and synchronise them using event listeners. This approach allows you to set the alpha for each layer independently.

I will try to add the support for #2 to the codebase soon.

KML would be a great thing to handle (as would GeoRSS, GeoJSON), and I believe someone on the Google Maps discussion group recently posted a solution that extends the Adobe syndication classes to support KML data types. Hopefully that will be released under a license that lets us quickly adapt it to Modest Maps too.

Lokesh replied on July 20, 2008 14:39 to the discussion "Tell Us About Your Experience With Modest Maps" in Modest Maps:

Dear Modest Map team,

We have our online mapping application at www.mapmandu.com, featuring location destinations in Kathmandu. The site is a DotNetNuke application with custom module for ModestMap, and custom map tiles. So far, we have had a great experience using ModestMap, however the lack of tile layers and KML overlay might make us consider other mapping platforms.

Best,
Lokesh

A comment on the question "Is there some kind of WMS Map Provider for modest maps? (AS3)" in Modest Maps:

Giil, that's actully using Yahoo as the base layer and a mapserver WMS overlay. but yes, you could easily use Geoserver as a WMS for the baselayer or as an overlay. – brentp, on July 16, 2008 22:12

RandomEtc replied on July 16, 2008 15:30 to the discussion "Tell Us About Your Experience With Modest Maps" in Modest Maps:

Thanks for your feedback rjcarr.

Have you thought about contributing your changes back to the Modest Maps code-base to ease your future upgrade worries?

I believe it's possible to do lots of things with the Modest Maps code that can't be done in Google Maps. Top of my list is View Source and fix problems, but another one is create a standalone swf - Google Maps relies on the network to give access to their code, which is loaded remotely.

That said, if there are specific things you can do faster or more reliably in Google Maps I would like to know about them so I can fix them! Feel free to start another thread about ways that Modest Maps could be more polished or faster :)

rjcarr started following the discussion "Tell Us About Your Experience With Modest Maps" in Modest Maps.

rjcarr replied on July 16, 2008 06:51 to the discussion "Tell Us About Your Experience With Modest Maps" in Modest Maps:

I looked into using ModestMaps for a project that I'm starting and I got great feedback from the admins on this forum, so a huge thanks for that!

I've recently been looking at the somewhat new flash api for google maps and since I had previous experience with the js api it makes an easy transition. My thoughts are (relevant to modest maps):

1) Con: The Google API for flash is more polished and the algorithms seem faster with less errors (nothing to be ashamed of, it is google after all)

2) Pro: The Google API is closed and the MM API is open.

3) Con: I had to make quite a few changes to the MM code to make it work for me. This makes me nervous about handling future upgrades.

So, at this point, I think I'm leaning towards using google maps, but if you need the flexibility of other map providers, or just like the openness of MM, it is highly recommended.

A comment on the problem "We're Error: We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application" in Modest Maps:

rjcarr - Allan probably found this post through a search. Google also gives the same error message on other services, not just the tile server, when it thinks you might be abusing its servers. – RandomEtc, on July 09, 2008 19:37

tapster replied on July 09, 2008 04:48 to the question "hosting your own tileset?" in Modest Maps:

thanks so much Mike. is the expectation that range(8) will grab all the tiles you have, or is there another level I can go down?

thanks again for all this great stuff

migurski replied on July 08, 2008 23:53 to the question "hosting your own tileset?" in Modest Maps:

Hm, holes, that's no good. Most likely those are a combination of flakey S3 connections (not uncommon) and my own poor exception handling. Maybe try running it twice to see if it fills them all in, while I try to budget some time to improve the script?

tapster replied on July 08, 2008 23:17 to the question "hosting your own tileset?" in Modest Maps:

sorry, I should have elaborated a little more. I used the duplicate scripts here http://mike.teczno.com/notes/blue-mar... to host our own s3 bucket of Blue Marble tiles, but the script has a range() value to decide how many to generate. using 8 I get holes at tighter zooms. I was wondering what the value was to grab all the modest map tiles since hit or miss takes literally days to run :)

A comment on the problem "We're Error: We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application" in Modest Maps:

What does giving you image tiles (outside of their intended use) have to do with searching? I'm looking for a solution too, that's why I'm at this thread, but they have every right to limit the access to their tiles. – rjcarr, on July 08, 2008 23:08

rjcarr replied on July 08, 2008 22:59 to the question "is there a new google_version.xml?" in Modest Maps:

Thanks Random ... I'm looking forward to the release. Actually, I'm making as little changes in the core libraries as possible in anticipation of the next release.

I went down the road of extending the parts I needed to change but it wasn't as easy as I expected.

PS -- I like that setting up proxies or adding addons is easier for you than looking at a firefox built-in URL request applet. :)

RandomEtc replied on July 08, 2008 22:54 to the question "is there a new google_version.xml?" in Modest Maps:

Yep, you can dig the URLs out of there too, it's just easier with Charles or Firebug.

In our experience, the Yahoo numbers change much less frequently than the Google ones, but if you want to code something up similar to the google_version.xml that would be great.

FYI, in the modest maps subversion repository there's a branch called tom-tweenlite where a lot of the as3 code has changed. We're planning a new release soon. One of the changes has been to pull out all the Throttled this-and-that which was a hangover from the Flashlite code in the as2 version. TileGrid has had a complete rewrite, but also the map providers have been simplified. Now map providers with settings must be loaded and initialised before initialising the map.

You can see how we're doing this in AbstractGoogleMapProvider – the IMapProvider interface no longer extends IEventDispatcher, so providers with events to dispatch will need to do it by aggregating an EventDispatcher, like so:

http://modestmaps.mapstraction.com/tr...

It's not particularly well tested because frankly I'm weary of tracking the Google version numbers so I never use them, but that's how I'd recommend implementing the Yahoo ones if you're so inclined.

rjcarr started following the question "hosting your own tileset?" in Modest Maps.

rjcarr replied on July 08, 2008 22:54 to the question "hosting your own tileset?" in Modest Maps:

Modest Maps is just a map tile viewer ... it doesn't have any intrinsic zoom level.

rjcarr replied on July 08, 2008 22:37 to the question "is there a new google_version.xml?" in Modest Maps:

Thanks for the quick reply ... I don't assume there is any machinery for version numbers in yahoo providers? Maybe a generic version number getter is in order for all providers?

As for the proxy, and getting the requested URLs, can't you just use the Tools -> Page Info -> Media in Firefox? Safari has something similar in Activity, I think.

RandomEtc replied on July 08, 2008 22:27 to the question "is there a new google_version.xml?" in Modest Maps:

Sorry I missed the URL in your earlier post. If you're getting a straight 404, they most likely changed their version numbers, just like Google do. If you take a look at the requests on maps.yahoo.com you should be able to pick out what the new numbers are quite easily. I use Charles for that kind of thing, other people prefer Firebug, or IE or Opera or Safari's equivalents.

Sadly there's no code mode that I'm aware of, though we did ask the folks at GetSatisfaction for one... I'll chase it up.