Systeme D

14 February 2007

Streetmap updates its imagery

...and says bye-bye to the Ordnance Survey?

The public site still looks the same as it has done since 1802, but their version for Rightmove has been updated at street level - look here, for example. The labels are now Helvetica (or similar) rather than the unreadable Avant Garde-ish font they used to have, and interestingly, the credit in the bottom left is now to Navteq rather than Ordnance Survey.

The Landranger (OS 1:50k) and Bartholomews road atlas layers appear to be unchanged, so there's still no sign of the Aston Clinton bypass on the 1:50k, for example.

Interesting to see, once again, a major webmap company trying out new things on their embedded sites before launching them publicly. Similarly, Multimap's mapping for Yell has been AJAX 'slippy' for a while now, but multimap.com is still one page per map view. (It's worth pointing out that OS's licence terms and conditions pretty much require this, unless they've changed significantly since I was at Waterscape.)

Comments

Hi,
Its no so much one page per map view, but rather per map tile. It is easier to record it on a page per hit basis rather than try to record when a new map tile is currently served as we do on w/s. The dragging facility you implemented means that we have to do something like this so we now have a script that works out when a new map tile is pulled into the view and we record it for the nice O/S ppl when they come for the money. ;)

cheers,
paul

Posted by paul morgan on 14.2.07 21:54

I thought (may be wrong) that the OS contract specified a "map view" with a maximum pixel size?

But I may call you in as evidence about the "dragging facility" re: the recent Google Maps patent... they appear to be claiming a patent on slippy maps dated about two months after I demonstrated the first version of the Waterscape draggable map to you lot. ;)

Posted by Richard on 15.2.07 14:52

hi,
so, as in say 250x250 is the max size for a map view? If we have a view area of 500x500, we serve 4 tiles right. So, (I think) the script then looks at the next request in that session and works out the new point and whether a further 250px have been moved in whatever direction, and therefore a new 'map view' has been served. Make sense?

So long as you put the draggable stuff into subversion then I think you may have a case. The svn log should show the date.. I think.. will have to check on it, but I guess we may be able to track it via the emails to +ive and the like when it was being tested.

tats,
paul

Posted by paul morgan on 19.2.07 10:50

Add a comment

Your name:

E-mail address: 

Comment:

your comment. (E-mail addresses will not be visible, but a server-based mail link will be provided. To guard against spam, no comments which include 'http' or 'www' will be published.)