Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tiny World Map

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 94 posts

Re: Tiny World Map

#81

Post by _ache_ »

pastage wrote: post #74
_ache_ wrote: post #18

I made the same (offline first, very small, vector based) but with a focus on i18n. So it's available in all languages of the United Nation (except Spanish because I just forgot, shame on me, could be made in a couple of hours). The name of the countries (and cities) are the official one declared at the UN. So, yeah, the official short version of UK is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". https://m…

Couldn't find any description on how you made that, it is a beautiful map. There are things about Tiny World Maps as well, but they do not have a good description on how it's made either. From my own experience on a country scale it was a manual process with dirty hacks then getting the testing to get it right was the worst (mainly the right generalization, and what people expect on their local map). Do you think it…

I will improve the map and explain how it was made and why, because I think it worth it.

But I'm not going to improve it significantly.

Thank you. ^^

Re: Tiny World Map

#82

Post by tuukkah »

Aachen wrote: post #53
dansky wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice project! It may be useful to select the included places also by QRank of Wikidata [1] so notable islands will appear, despite low populations. An SQLite DB of QRank [2] was also posted here in HN a while ago. [1] https://qrank.wmcloud.org/ [2] https://github.com/hikeratlas/qrank

(Saving people a click for link#1: qrank sorts Wikidata entries by their pageviews across Wikipedia, Wikiquotes, Wikibooks, etc.) I'm not sure that an online popularity contest should be the input for a base map. I understand the reasoning that they're more likely to be viewed by someone, but it's also a bubble: is Wikipedia / are Wikimedia projects as popular in Asia as this base map will be? Is that used for the sa…

qrank is not a mere popularity contest and definitely not a more arbitrary measure of importance than the count of population within city boundaries (boundaries can be arbitrary; population vs commuters vs tourists; regional capitals etc.)

> I just don't think this is the right (objective, fairest) importance measure to use

What's "right" can depend on the purpose of the map.

Re: Tiny World Map

#83

Post by zimpenfish »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #68
zimpenfish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few towns in the UK are off in the sea And some, notably Manchester, are entirely absent.

Manchester's there, ESE of Salford, if you zoom in enough.

Wasn't there yesterday!

[edit: also still kinda broken though because Southport, Blackpool, Burnley, Grimsby etc. all appear before Manchester which makes no sense.]

Re: Tiny World Map

#84

Post by pastage »

perrygeo wrote: post #39
rozab wrote: post #15

This is cool, but the shorelines are very low detail. A few towns in the UK are off in the sea, meanwhile Greenland and Northern Canada are hogging all the vertices. It looks as though the Mercator projection is already being accounted for in the detail level, but it would be good to deprioritize unpopulated areas.

The simplification was sloppy all around. Entire nations are missing in the Caribbean. These are basic quality control checks.

The step from simple simplification to automatic generalizations is not trivial, the map agency in Sweden just recently began publishing map updates for different scales using their own automatic generalization rules. I'm guessing they will save a lot of man hours by doing that, but they have taken their sweet time doing it.

The zoom needs to be locked this map should not be used/critiqued beyond a certain level and that needs to be more apparent. You can see the same the map that Ache posted bellow, as long as you keep zoomed out it is mostly good enough. My point is that this is not a sloppy job, but you are right that neither managed to solve the hardest problem.

Re: Tiny World Map

#86

Post by medstrom »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #50

I think I love the idea - solve the problem of "you zoomed out too far, now wait for the server to load tiles for the continent you just asked to be rendered" - but I'm not sure what the use cases are where I need to know where West Bloomfield Township is in relationship to Waterford Charter Township (both suburbs of Detroit) but not what state they're in or even that the Great Lakes exist. I would like to see a lot…

To say nothing of road and rail! It makes sense in a road map that you keep in your car, but you don't need to know where the roads are otherwise. Blots out so much other possible info.

Re: Tiny World Map

#87

Post by jokoon »

likeclockwork wrote: post #57
jokoon wrote: post #52

seems a bit weird to use a service worker to do an offline version... the tutorial linked is long and worthless if you want people to quickly install and use it, you need to either make a shorter more concise tutorial. imagine somebody loses internet access, he can't really open this thing to just access a map, I don't understand. why not just provide a html file with the tiles encoded as base64 or something similar?…

That's what service workers are for. This service worker explicitly caches all the resources the app needs to run then intercepts requests for those resources so all the JS that depends on the resources still runs while you're offline. If you had visited the site in the past, even if you were offline you would be able to go to that URL and the service worker would serve everything needed from cache.

that means the demo doesn't have a service worker?

Re: Tiny World Map

#90

Post by jlv2 »

rozab wrote: post #15

This is cool, but the shorelines are very low detail. A few towns in the UK are off in the sea, meanwhile Greenland and Northern Canada are hogging all the vertices. It looks as though the Mercator projection is already being accounted for in the detail level, but it would be good to deprioritize unpopulated areas.

I noticed that all of the New York City metropolitan area was replaced with a single angled line, cutting off several large islands supporting a few million in population.
Post reply on HN