Really? A dark share button taking away screen real estate? Are you out of your freaking mind?
Also, preload tiles so I don't get ugly white boxes for just midly steering out of my current viewbox.
Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
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Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was designed primarily on a MacBook Pro running Linux, so the colors were oddly calibrated. We tested it on several other calibrated monitors, and a few other devices (iPhone/Pad/Android). Short story is that it could be much bolder and more colorful, at the cost of aesthetics. A growing number of users have good screens - sometimes excellent screens like most mobile devices.
Ok, but have you tested it on the absolute worst your users will be using? What does it look like on grandma's 17 inch crt from 2002?
It'll probably look odd, just like everything on an old computer. Designing for the craziest CRT is just as bad or worse than designing for a cinema display.
Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#23I hope the terribly slow map rendering is just a direct result of early release scaling problems. Because it's running unusably slow here. Edit: I'd like to clarify, it is running in a usable, if laggy fashion, in general, but the main advantage of Google Maps to most competition IMO, is the blistering speed.
We just saw a genuine torrent of traffic and are scaling up as I speak.
For me (on an iPad), the problem isn't the loading speed, but the interface that blocks/loses the pinch state when rendering new layers.
Zooming in/out stops working and you have to restart the pinching gesture to continue.
Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#24Really? A dark share button taking away screen real estate? Are you out of your freaking mind? Also, preload tiles so I don't get ugly white boxes for just midly steering out of my current viewbox.
The share button is only on the embeds. When you use the API, you won't have to worry about these. (See: http://mapbox.com/hosting/mapbox-streets/)
Tile loading should behave just like you see with Google Maps or MapQuest, or any other tile-based slippy map.
Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#25Great news! Is this available at high zooms across the US and Canada yet?
It's z16 globally - as soon as this is solidly out in the wild, we'll be working hard on getting deeper zoom levels. Each zoom level is exponentially larger than the last, so it's a significant challenge.
As a maps dev, I'm very familiar with those exponential scaling problems, 4^z is a bitch. :-) Thanks for taking on this problem.
What zoom level are you all at in major US metro areas?
Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#26Any chance of getting an SRTM terrain layer?
Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's z16 globally - as soon as this is solidly out in the wild, we'll be working hard on getting deeper zoom levels. Each zoom level is exponentially larger than the last, so it's a significant challenge.
As a maps dev, I'm very familiar with those exponential scaling problems, 4^z is a bitch. :-) Thanks for taking on this problem. What zoom level are you all at in major US metro areas?
Is there a way to selectively cache to deeper levels in certain areas? That'd be rad.
Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#28And that's why I won't need Google Maps anymore; congrats guys, that is awesome work.
A couple questions/comments;
- You'll probably need to work on the readability of some of the Asian charsets; Korean works just fine, Thai and especially Chinese are very hard to read. I guess you'd need to detect specific characters and render them slightly bigger (that is what we sometimes do with Chinese, rendering English text as 14 px and Chinese at 15 for example).
- I'd be interested in knowing what the final size of the tileset is.
Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#29Nice color scheme, but the labels need more contrast
Re: Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
#30Nice color scheme, but the labels need more contrast
I disagree. It's so low contrast, it's hard to see anything.
Plus it plain lacks detail. Compare the same view of Manhattan:
Google's result is actually useful in many ways. It shows street direction, subway stops (very important!), some points of interest. The font's are easily readable. The names of the streets are abbreviated, no need to have the words "street", "east", "west" all over your map.