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I had no idea how to make custom maps, so I learnt by doing. You should too.

blog.untogether.co.uk

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Re: I had no idea how to make custom maps, so I learnt by doing. You should too.

#21

Hey Alastair, great post! Understanding OSM labels and so on can be pretty time consuming. You might like the mapdig library for CartoDB that lets you drill down into your spatial data to get a handle on what's what: http://vizzuality.github.com/mapdig/examples/osm_line.html (OSM london lines demo). Maybe next time :)

That's pretty awesome. I'll definitely play around with this.

Re: I had no idea how to make custom maps, so I learnt by doing. You should too.

#22
Interesting. What's odd, though, is the road layout. If you look at the interactive map, you'll see that it deletes major roads before deleting minor roads. If you go over by 23rd/11th and zoom in to the point where the transition between no-buildings and buildings occurs, you'll see the west side highway. Then, zoom out. The access roads to the indoor Chelsea Piers parking lots show up, but the the 6-lane highway disappears.

Odd. This happened the last time there was an article about make-your-own maps, too.

Re: I had no idea how to make custom maps, so I learnt by doing. You should too.

#23
Looks very cool.

You might want to look at tile caching projects which might make the initial tile-generation take less time in exchange for only pre-rendering some tiles. (Perhaps less important in your situation but would be beneficial when you want to cover a larger area.)

I had a quick look at some options, this might work with your set up: http://tilestache.org/

Re: I had no idea how to make custom maps, so I learnt by doing. You should too.

#25
Is it just me or does that map functionality throw a wobbly in Chrome on Mac?

By using a magic mouse and a single swipe backwards/forwards - which is to zoom in/out respectively (similar to a mouse wheel), causes the page to freeze and for Chrome to kill it due to it being unresponsive.

This functionality works fine on the generic MapBox demos.

It's a shame because custom maps are a good idea, especially when you have so much flexibility over the styling, I just like using gestures to make zooming that little bit easier.

Re: I had no idea how to make custom maps, so I learnt by doing. You should too.

#26
post #2

A brief introduction to the world of map making from a total amateur. I intend to write some follow up posts going into more detail on making iPhone retina tiles, tweaking leaflet.js and so on.

Hey, this is great stuff. I love how you matched the theme of your app to your maps; I haven't really seen that before.

+1, those maps look fantastic!
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