With our releases of Vector tiles, a cloudless world, and a brand new way to edit OpenStreetMap, we’ve been busy this last month.
If you’re in New York City on Thursday, May 30th, join us for drinks to celebrate these milestones. We’ll kick it off at 6pm at Swift in Lower Manhattan. Eric, Alex, and Garrett will be there and eager to chat about maps, cartography, and technology.
We recently relaunched the MapBox product tour, and part of that redesign includes a custom map showing off our server infrastructure:
Even though this map began its life as a vector illustration in Inkscape, it’s actually a fully-functional tile-based slippy map. This allows us to do cool things like add markers based on lat/lon coordinates, and add panning and zooming, that would be impossible with just a static image.
Today’s release of the gorgeous City Guides by National Geographic mobile app showcases the perfect marriage of expansive content, a high level of attention to detail and polish, and the flexibility of MapBox’s platform, all in one package.
We recently got in touch with Jess Elder, Senior Product Manager at National Geographic, as well as Thomas Cooke, Ben Cline, and Adam Luptak at Rally Interactive, the talented shop behind the app, for a little Q&A about the app, its development, and their use of MapBox along the way.
MapBox makes use of Amazon’s high-performance cloud infrastructure in order to scale quickly with demand and avoid single points of failure. So when Amazon’s Jeff Barr announced that he was driving across the United States to meet with user groups, we were sure he had a great map to capture the trip.
As Wired and FastCo just reported, we’ve pushed a huge update to MapBox Satellite today. Not only did we just launch our new Cloudless Atlas imagery for the entire world (down through zoom level 8), we also launched new aerial imagery for the entire US and EU down to zoom level 19. Everything is traceable in OpenStreetMap, and now any edits to OpenStreetMap show up on MapBox within 5 minutes. This tight feedback loop is letting us map the world in real time - all in the open.
Charlie Loyd walking though the processing algorithms used to map Cloudless Atlas.
“This is what the world looks like to an astronaut on a cloudless day: new technology lets you see satellite images of the Earth with a clarity you’ve never seen before, and reveals massive changes to our landscape that used to be hard to see.” - Ariel Schwartz, Senior Editor at FastCo
After iD’s launch on OpenStreetMap.org last week, many new and existing users tried it out and started editing the worldwide map.
This is the lower Mangoky river, southwest Madagascar, as seen with the EVI2 vegetation index as derived from data collected by NASA’s MODIS sensors in 2011 and 2012. To the south of the river’s mouth, you can see Lake Ihotry shrink in 2012. It’s been on a downward trend for a few years, and at the end of 2012’s dry season it almost disappeared for a few weeks. North of the delta, some dark areas appear – deforestation. The largest of them (just south of the second largest river in our view, Maintapaka) is about 6.5 km (4 mi) on a side, or roughly half the area of Manhattan.
We just launched MapBox Earth, a free and open source iOS app that combines the power of a 3D globe with MapBox’s beautiful maps. It’s also a great starting point to build your own 3D mapping app - we’re cracking the 3D globe software market wide open by releasing the source code and building in the open.
After yesterday’s launch of iD, a new editor for OpenStreetMap.org, the number of users making their first edit to OpenStreetMap more than quadrupled.
Reaching 1.0, the new iD editor is now available directly on OpenStreetMap.org
A peek over AJ’s shoulder while he uses an early internal preview of TileMill 2, 100% powered by our new vector tile stack developed by Dane, Artem, and Young.
We’re combining TileMill’s deep design control and the worldwide big data of MapBox Streets into a fast, incredibly powerful interface. Now brands can use house fonts on the map, organizations can specify approved international borders, and search companies can integrate their own POIs into the map tiles. This is a major element in our push to make maps the canvas for everything location, and it’s a lot more than just changing colors. It’s about radical customization, and taking cartography to scale.
On Friday, we hosted an Open Government happy hour in the MapBox Garage to kick off Transparency Camp 2013, an unconference organized by The Sunlight Foundation. Over 200 of our friends from across the open government and open data spaces joined us for beers and empanadas. Check out a few of our favorite photos from the event below, and be sure to check out the full album on flickr.
The Tibetan Plateau. The plateau itself is covered in irregular hills, and its western half has no river drainage, so rainfall forms large lakes. They are called jewel-toned lakes for the colors of the minerals that collect in them. In this Cloudless Atlas imagery we see them uninterrupted by clouds and image seams, just as bright as they are in real life.
This view covers an enormous region of south-central Asia, about the same area as the contiguous United States. We’re looking at the highest area in the world, the Tibetan plateau. It’s raised by the collision of the Indian subcontinent into Asia – a process that’s been happening for 40 million years so far and has created what geologists believe may be the largest plateau in earth’s history. Its southern edge is the Himalaya range, including Mount Everest (near the centerline of this view), which is still rising by several millimeters per year. On its northwest, it borders the Taklamakan desert, a huge sea of sand dunes visible as a bright oval. At the eastern edge of the Taklamakan is Lop Nur, a famously inhospitable lakebed where China conducted nuclear-weapons testing. Along the bottom right of this view, the plateau merges with the Southeast Asian highlands.
I just finished the new t-shirt design for this year’s US OpenStreetMap conference – State of the Map – taking place in in San Francisco, CA, June 7-10. btw, today is the last day for early bird registration discounts!
MapBox Streets is now also available in Spanish and French, in addition to English and local languages. Just click on the “customize” tab to pick your language!
Today I am visiting Humboldt State University, along with Nathaniel Kelso, as a speaker in their first annual Geospatial Speaker Series and to lead two workshops on TileMill. HSU, like other innovative higher education institutions including Yale, UW-Madison, University of York, and University of Indonesia, is starting to adopt TileMill across geography courses and faculty projects.
With Leaflet integration brought by the v1 release of MapBox.js, it’s easy to add live data feeds as custom-styled layers on top of your custom MapBox maps. In this post, I go over using MapBox.js to power a Live Flood Warning site, which is powered by Weather Decision Technologies’ live weather feeds.
The border running east-west near the middle of this image is between Angola (on the north) and Namibia. On the Namibian side, cattle grazing is the norm, while Angolans in the area are generally crop farmers. Namibian cattle grazing across the border in Angola have been a source of political tension in past years, but the governments recently reached a deal. The Etosha Pan, a salt lake, is in the south. To the north, we can see some of Angola’s many deep river valley systems. Cloudless Atlas + OpenStreetMap labels from MapBox Streets.
We’re using TileMill more and more as an analytical tool, especially as we explore infrared bands. Infrared is not visible to the human eye, but it carries a wealth of environmental information, and many satellites capture it as well as – or even instead of – visible light. Since I’ve been working with a lot of visible data from the MODIS satellites for the Cloudless Atlas lately, I got curious about what could be seen in the infrared bands once they too were seamless and cloudless.
Here’s a look at the aftermath of the 2010 Russian forest fires using satellite IR data. You can scroll around and look at 2011’s EVI2 (a measurement of vegetation – read on for details), and to check whether a dark feature is a fire scar, you can pull across the red-green overlay showing year-on-year change. Or, with the overlay on, you can get a regional look at where vegetation was in midsummer 2011 as compared with a year earlier:
View fullscreen! The north and east of this view is covered in taiga – dense, cold-hardy forest that shows up brightly in EVI2 because of its heavy foliage. Across the middle and west is mixed forest with large areas cleared for cities and farms. If you zoom out, you might notice that this intermediate zone is mostly green, suggesting that it consistently improved from 2010 to 2011 – and you can clearly see the bright, taiga-covered southern edge of the Ural mountains interrupting it in the east. The southern edge of our view is mostly steppe, much of it converted to grain fields, verging into scrubland and desert (nearly black in EVI2) in Kazakhstan.
