One of the first screenshots we posted on this blog was that of the Joffre Group, showing a popular range of mountains north of Pemberton, BC. One of the down sides of a development blog is that some screenshots may show features that improve over time. Several changes have been made to map rendering the …
WMS can be a great source for map imagery, but many servers are vastly under powered. Also, most WMS servers render your map request on demand, which can take time and reduce the performance of an application, such as TrueNorth, using them as a data source. TileServers on the other hand can be blazingly fast …
We know that not all maps are terrestrial, and not all users are backcountry users. An obvious extension of TrueNorth is into the aviation industry, and to that end we demonstrate the inclusion of aeronautical charts below. The charts are provided as a Tile Map Service by Chartbundle.com
We came across some artistically rendered map tiles based on OpenStreetMap data by Stamen Designs and decided to showcase them in TrueNorth. Since we can already show OpenStreetMap tiles, it was a simple matter of setting the url appropriately. Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under CC BY SA.
Quoting from the ArcGIS Online site, “ArcGIS Online is a cloud-based, collaborative content management system for maps, apps, data, and other geographic information.” They also have one of the best sets of high availability, fast, cached map tiles in the known world. It was an easy decision to add support for their tile server into TrueNorth, …
One of the final pieces in the alpha version of TrueNorth is a demonstration of the software’s ability to integrate live tracking data from an external source. We implemented a tracking layer that’s intended to display position updates from various sources. The first source we implemented was APRS-IS APRS is the Automated Packet Reporting System …
A preface; this is not an April Fool’s joke. No, Web Map Serivce is a real thing and it’s one of the least known and most useful web-based mapping standards out there. Simply put, many government agencies put their maps online. By using WMS, they can make the map imagery available while keeping the underlying data “safe” — …
What’s this? A screenshot that isn’t a map? Yes, boring, but it demonstrates the various capabilities we are planning for TrueNorth — check out the layers we have here under development. Hopefully the layers speak for themselves, but here’s a quick summary. Grid Layer: draws the graticule and what cartographer’s call map furniture: these are …
The GPX import plugin was a no-brainer to write, so it’s been done and operating smoothly for a long time. In fact, the GPX standard and the data fields it supports helped to inspire some of the data structures within TrueNorth itself. This screenshot shows the results of a GPX file import. The data came …
Today we had a bug to fix; some eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the scale bar was incorrect in the previous two screenshots. In the process of fixing the bug we found that it was useful to compare the same area drawn in two separate map windows using different base map data: one using the Topographic …