DRG Rozel Point SW — Not Much Going On
The Big Map Blog points out that the Rozel Point SW DRG has few features showing on it. In fact it’s stuck in the middle of the Great Salt Lake.
http://topo.market.weogeo.com/datasets/topo-usgs-drg-topo-rozel-point-sw-ut/widget.html
USGS DRG Topo Rozel Point SW, UT
I’m sure there are tons of crazy TOPO QUADs out there but this one might take the prize. If you zoom into that dataset above on WeoGeo Market, you can see it’s just stuck in the middle of the lake.
http://topo.market.weogeo.com/widget?query=Rozel&lat=41.30173&lon=-112.71973&zoom=9&layers=BT
USGS DRG/Topo
The Big Map Blog has the QUAD as a JPG, but you can also download it on WeoGeo in whatever raster format works best for you including TIFF, ECW and ENVI.
HT: /r/gis/
More Google Maps Exodus — foursquare goes Mapbox
Every week it seems another company abandons Google Maps and goes another direction. As my good friends at Google are quick to point out, these companies are either small or the total numbers just don’t register. Well how about this news from foursquare?
Starting today, we’re embracing the OpenStreetMap movement, so all the maps you see when you go to foursquare.com will look a tiny bit different (we think the new ones are really pretty). Other than slightly different colors and buttons, though, foursquare is still the same site you know and love.
Sounds like they did this on a dare, but were quite surprised to see how easy it was and the results were more than they had before. Oh and the stack? OpenStreetMap, Leaflet and MapBox. Right? Where have we seen that before? Oh right, just about everywhere in the past 6 months.
They are utilizing MapBox Streets which the team from Development Seed announced earlier this week.http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox-streets.html#14.00/33.421111/-111.931667 And it isn’t just foursquare using MapBox, but many others.
MapBox Uses
The’ve got a great webpage up explaining how to get started using MapBox Streets and Leaflet. You should check it out.
Heston as Moses
“Let my mappers go!”
More Google Maps Exodus — foursquare goes Mapbox
Every week it seems another company abandons Google Maps and goes another direction. As my good friends at Google are quick to point out, these companies are either small or the total numbers just don’t register. Well how about this news from foursquare?
Starting today, we’re embracing the OpenStreetMap movement, so all the maps you see when you go to foursquare.com will look a tiny bit different (we think the new ones are really pretty). Other than slightly different colors and buttons, though, foursquare is still the same site you know and love.
Sounds like they did this on a dare, but were quite surprised to see how easy it was and the results were more than they had before. Oh and the stack? OpenStreetMap, Leaflet and MapBox. Right? Where have we seen that before? Oh right, just about everywhere in the past 6 months.
They are utilizing MapBox Streets which the team from Development Seed announced earlier this week.http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox-streets.html#14.00/33.421111/-111.931667 And it isn’t just foursquare using MapBox, but many others.
MapBox Uses
The’ve got a great webpage up explaining how to get started using MapBox Streets and Leaflet. You should check it out.
Heston as Moses
“Let my mappers go!”
ArcGIS’ Future — Sans Extensions?
While watching the Esri Federal GIS Conference last week, I tweeted this when Jack was talking about new features to the raster manipulation tools in ArcGIS 10.1.
https://twitter.com/jamesmfee/status/172351767303036930
Now if you were sitting there, you know you didn’t actually hear Jack say that. What he actually said was that you didn’t need external tools to manipulate rasters anymore. My Erdas joke aside, basically Esri is embedding tools into ArcGIS for Desktop that a year ago you’d pay another company for.
Now I don’t work with rasters anymore like I used to, but I can see the big picture here. Esri is filling in the spaces on their ArcGIS suite with tools that others used to provide. And even more interesting, they are including these tools essentially for free with your ArcGIS license. Maybe 10 years ago, you’d see an Extension for ArcGIS where raster tools could be licensed to those who might need them. Now they are being given away with the master ArcGIS package.
And it isn’t just raster, Lidar tools, 3D tools and other features users want are being backed right into the core ArcGIS package. This is a huge shift for Esri and one that I think Esri users will be very happy with. I still wake up in a cold sweat because I had a nightmare where all the Spatial Analyst tools were checked out and I had a deadline in 5 minutes. Now I’m not sure that we’ll see all these existing extensions being rolled into the core (some of it is probably licensing, see Data Interop), but you have to wonder what changes might be in store with 10.2 11 next year.
Sanchez
You can now flash some more cash around thanks to less software maintenance costs
The image manipulation tools in ArcGIS 10.1 look pretty sweet and given that we’ll have them available in the core ArcGIS package might make many Analysts jump for joy. I guess many can take that Erdas maintenance costs and buy something cool.
ArcGIS’ Future — Sans Extensions?
While watching the Esri Federal GIS Conference last week, I tweeted this when Jack was talking about new features to the raster manipulation tools in ArcGIS 10.1.
https://twitter.com/jamesmfee/status/172351767303036930
Now if you were sitting there, you know you didn’t actually hear Jack say that. What he actually said was that you didn’t need external tools to manipulate rasters anymore. My Erdas joke aside, basically Esri is embedding tools into ArcGIS for Desktop that a year ago you’d pay another company for.
Now I don’t work with rasters anymore like I used to, but I can see the big picture here. Esri is filling in the spaces on their ArcGIS suite with tools that others used to provide. And even more interesting, they are including these tools essentially for free with your ArcGIS license. Maybe 10 years ago, you’d see an Extension for ArcGIS where raster tools could be licensed to those who might need them. Now they are being given away with the master ArcGIS package.
And it isn’t just raster, Lidar tools, 3D tools and other features users want are being backed right into the core ArcGIS package. This is a huge shift for Esri and one that I think Esri users will be very happy with. I still wake up in a cold sweat because I had a nightmare where all the Spatial Analyst tools were checked out and I had a deadline in 5 minutes. Now I’m not sure that we’ll see all these existing extensions being rolled into the core (some of it is probably licensing, see Data Interop), but you have to wonder what changes might be in store with 10.2 11 next year.
Sanchez
You can now flash some more cash around thanks to less software maintenance costs
The image manipulation tools in ArcGIS 10.1 look pretty sweet and given that we’ll have them available in the core ArcGIS package might make many Analysts jump for joy. I guess many can take that Erdas maintenance costs and buy something cool.
Bing Maps and Nokia get Unified
There is such focus on Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and projects like TileMill that you forget about the smaller elephant in the room (the one behind the Google elephant). It looks like Bing Maps and Nokia are getting “unified”.
Last year, we entered into a strategic partnership with Nokia which included plans to offer a unique and compelling mapping experience for our customers. Since then we’ve been working with Nokia and Windows Phone to deliver a unified map style based on one set of design principles with the goal of providing a more intuitive and pleasing online mapping experience. Our Bing Maps designers teamed closely with our partners at Nokia Maps and the Windows Phone team to unify our map elements, improve contrast and usability to ultimately create a more beautiful and functional map. Today we’re excited to share the new map design, available on desktop and mobile versions of Bing and Nokia maps.
So it looks like both services will use the same background tiles and leverage the technologies that both bring to the table (including Navteq). A quick look at the tiles, at least on the desktop still show Bing Maps using the older style, but [Nokia Maps seems to be using](http://maps.nokia.com/#
33.4288021
-111.8618565
12
0
0
normal.day) what is described in the blog post above.
Nokia Maps Unified
I’ll be honest, I do like the new tiles as they are shown in Nokia Maps. There is just something about grey backgrounds that appeal to me.
Now maybe Bing is going to roll out these new tiles soon, but for now you’ll need to use Nokia Maps to see what they are looking at. Even on my iPhone, I’m still seeing the older Bing Maps tiles.
Bing Maps Not Unified