3 ms·

Another option for map tiles is http://www.thunderforest.com http://www.thunderforest.com On the data side there's the recently launched http://opencagedata.co

Another option for map tiles is http://www.thunderforest.com http://www.thunderforest.com On the data side there's the recently launched http://opencagedata.com http://opencagedata.com (disclosure, I'm the founder). The point is with OSM there's more than one way to do it. You can dive in, get your hands dirty and do it all yourself, or work with a rapidly growing ecosystem of service providers who do the work for you at a cost. With private geodata / map providers, be they internet giants like Goog or national mapping agencies there is their way or ... their way.

buro9 13y ago
My biggest use-case for maps on web-sites is to simply communicate a location. Not to navigate by car, by bike, by foot. Not to show advertiser bubbles, or utilities. Just a clear communication of "The point in question is in this neighbourhood, at that point.". For me, that's the beauty in MapBox's Streets style... it does that one thing really well. Retaining enough countryside detail to make location recognition very good, and it works brilliantly in a city. Yet at the same time it's neutral enough to look great no matter how bad the design of the web-site it appears on. I definitely prefer non-US, and non-giant mapping providers, but there's a lot to be said for cartographers who design maps to be useful generically for location recognition rather than anything else. I strongly feel that this is what Google Maps got so right, and is also why MapBox will do very well. More than the tech, design matters.
- andyking 13y ago
  I agree with this, which is why the new Google Maps rubs me up the wrong way. I don't like how it changes the emphasis of different streets and roads depending on what you've searched for. A major road is a major road, and shouldn't turn into a minor road just because the restaurant you clicked on isn't on it. We look at a map of our town or city, and the main roads in and out are the spines - everything is off one of them. If you turn those white, and remove the emphasis, the map becomes far less readable.
shubb 13y ago
Props for opencagedata.com! It's fairly easy (days work) to set up a Geoserver web map server to provide the data you need as a Web Map Service. You could use parent's data. People should note the GetFeatureInfo interface that WMS provides for asking about the entities in a particular part of the map - click a house, yield the address and owner as XML (if you have that data). Then you'd use openlayers to implement the web map on your site. A 'roll your own' solution like this is only a good idea if you want to do something special, but an off the shelf solution constrains what you believe you can do. Imagine if every start-up was doing their site in wordpress.
- freyfogle 13y ago
  Thanks, we went live literally just a few days ago, so any and all feedback on our site or proposition would be very helpful.

buro9 13y ago

My biggest use-case for maps on web-sites is to simply communicate a location. Not to navigate by car, by bike, by foot. Not to show advertiser bubbles, or utilities. Just a clear communication of "The point in question is in this neighbourhood, at that point.". For me, that's the beauty in MapBox's Streets style... it does that one thing really well. Retaining enough countryside detail to make location recognition very good, and it works brilliantly in a city. Yet at the same time it's neutral enough to look great no matter how bad the design of the web-site it appears on. I definitely prefer non-US, and non-giant mapping providers, but there's a lot to be said for cartographers who design maps to be useful generically for location recognition rather than anything else. I strongly feel that this is what Google Maps got so right, and is also why MapBox will do very well. More than the tech, design matters.

andyking 13y ago
I agree with this, which is why the new Google Maps rubs me up the wrong way. I don't like how it changes the emphasis of different streets and roads depending on what you've searched for. A major road is a major road, and shouldn't turn into a minor road just because the restaurant you clicked on isn't on it. We look at a map of our town or city, and the main roads in and out are the spines - everything is off one of them. If you turn those white, and remove the emphasis, the map becomes far less readable.

shubb 13y ago

Props for opencagedata.com! It's fairly easy (days work) to set up a Geoserver web map server to provide the data you need as a Web Map Service. You could use parent's data. People should note the GetFeatureInfo interface that WMS provides for asking about the entities in a particular part of the map - click a house, yield the address and owner as XML (if you have that data). Then you'd use openlayers to implement the web map on your site. A 'roll your own' solution like this is only a good idea if you want to do something special, but an off the shelf solution constrains what you believe you can do. Imagine if every start-up was doing their site in wordpress.

freyfogle 13y ago
Thanks, we went live literally just a few days ago, so any and all feedback on our site or proposition would be very helpful.