ioMap

If you’re been redirected here from the cheers.au.com site, thanks for your interest! Cheers.au.com and iomap.com have been used for similar content for several years but I no longer have the time to maintain both sites. So instead I’ve added the most important parts of the old content here and closed down the other site.

If you have any comments / questions about this site or the maps used, please contact me by email using the address chris at the cheers domain above.

Originally published 15 September 2006, this is content imported from the cheers.au.com site, to be removed shortly.

I haven’t had much time to work on this site recently but the latest developments to Google Maps are just too good to ignore. Earlier this year they dramatically improved map and satellite image quality and as of August the Geo-coder (which converts addresses into map coordinates) now covers Australia. So an already good product has become a great one, and the fact that Google provides it for free* is just astounding!

This is a quick example of what can be done rather easily – cobbled together from the code given in the API documentation:

Click and drag the map to move around, double-click to recentre and zoom in. Or just experiment with the controls provided… Zoomed right in some of the roads aren’t quite accurate but this is still a really impressive system. Thanks Google!

And the future of my own simple maps? Well, for now I’ll leave them in place for comparison but longer term the aim is to replace all with Google Maps.

* The Google Maps API is free to use subject to these terms and conditions, but Google suggests that at some stage these maps will come with advertising – only to be expected considering the cost of operating a service like this. For now, it’s free – enjoy!

Originally published 04 March 2005, this is content imported from the cheers.au.com site, to be removed shortly.

Two people independently have raised the issue of update speed for the Flash maps when accessed by dial-up connections (thanks for your feedback guys!). Basically the map stays in its blurry state for too long while the detailed images load.
I’ve been considering the options for this and I think the best one by far is to introduce a set of intermediate scale image tiles – here’s the logic:

• The map currently is 400 x 400 pixels (I’ve tried various sizes and I don’t want to go any smaller than that).
• Zooming in, the Zoomify Flash interface loads images at 50% scale, so a total image size of 800 x 800.
• With the current tile size (256 x 256) the number of tiles vertically and horizontally will always be 4 or 5, so the total number of tiles to form the image will be 16, 20 or 25.
• By introducing the extra images I should be able to load at 70% instead, with a total image size of 566 x 566 so only 3 or 4 tiles each way – total number of tiles 9, 12 or 16.
• On average I think I should end up loading about half the number of images for each view without increasing the individual image size.

So that’s the theory. In practice I don’t think it will be possible using the free Zoomify interface so will have to wait until I get my dHTML system going…

Any comments or other suggestions welcome.

The new site finally goes online to showcase forthcoming developments to the interactive Australia maps. Some more work is needed before this kind of map can replace those on the Cheers maps and Lake Macquarie directory sites so this is a sneak preview. Please try it out and if you can spare me the time to leave a comment it would be much appreciated.

This is an example of a new map interface using Flash. Notable changes include:

• Maps stored as image tiles at various scales – allows for much larger and more detailed images without overloading the server.
• Background colours and watermark on images.
• Asynchronous updates (continue scrolling / zooming in and out while the map is updating).

The zoom / pan controls should be self-explanatory so please try it out and let me know what you think!

Looking for the old ioMap site? Sorry, it’s no longer available, but I’m building up something much better – interactive maps of Australia using Flash and (soon, I promise!) Ajax, plus the ability to customize background images, use special colours and symbols, edit the map contents, incorporate your own map images and lots more…

For now please see the ioMap home page for the latest Flash version of the Aussie map.