Recently at MapBox
Subscribe via RSSWe’ve partnered with USA Today to visualize the impact of Monday’s tornado in Oklahoma. The Civil Air Patrol conducted flyovers, capturing aerial images immediately after the storm. The images captured were different from traditional vertical aerial photography and weren’t fully georeferenced, meaning creating a mosaic basemap wasn’t feasible.
Instead, we took a different approach to navigating the rapid response imagery – the images, previously only available piecemeal on the USGS HDDS website, are displayed on the map as markers. The markers track the Civil Air Patrol flightpath, and specific markers represent the location of the camera as it captured the image, rather than the location of the image itself.
Today and tomorrow, Justin, Tom, AJ, Eric and myself are at Foss4GNA in Minneapolis.
We’re looking forward to two great days of catching up with the open source spatial community and talking about our recent work around vector tiles, Cloudless Atlas, OpenStreetMap editing and open source mobile SDKs.
In a little over two weeks many folks on the MapBox team will head to San Francisco for the annual US-based OpenStreetMap conference. We’re gearing up for an interesting and productive trip and are especially looking forward to meeting and exchanging ideas with the 350+ OpenStreetMap users and contributors who will be attending the conference.
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!