For a real estate project I need to demonstrate the property rates by regional(not markers) on google map by means of geochart/intensitymap/ drilldown highchart. I found that geochart is not capable to show states. The map I need is of Australian suburbs not the five states.
Any advice is appreciated.
I am afraid at this point in time the answer is: Google's GeoChart for Oz doesn't offer suburb level imagery.
Early last year I went to a networking function in Brisvegas where someone was pitching http://viewdata.io/ which looked interesting, but I didn't investigate very thoroughly because Google's state&territory map was good enough for my project.
Furthermore, there is a pile of urls being thrown around over at this aussie whirlpool thread: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2184431 "Creating a Heatmap using Postcodes".
Good luck.
Related
I have a set of routing data, in both CSV or KML format. It is basically a list of Lat / Lon and some supporting information.
I am looking for a way to display this as a route (e.g. with lines between the points in the order they appear in the list) online. Ideally a free option, as I'm not likely to need it again in the near future.
I have found hundreds (maybe an exageration) of ways of plotting the points, but not one that will include the lines. I'm trying to avoid the long and tedious process of converting one of these to an image and drawing the lines by hand.
Can anyone suggest such a site?
This question was asked on a google group for google maps. The user received an answer that pointed him towards the google map API. Given how other apps / web pages do this using google maps (never seen it done any other way) I would imagine this would be the best route to go down as its probably something they have built into the service.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/google-maps-js-api-v3/F_iroBiBeww
Is it possible to change map element colors in a MapView in the same way that you can with a Google Map? If so, how would I go about doing this.
I'm looking to change map element colors pretty substantially, so I don't think that adding an Annotation as described here is the right solution.
As an example, http://geo.rkn.la has a map that is skinned to be grayscale, and Google has documentation of how to do this for web maps here.
I gave CloudMade a try, and it wound up working reasonably well, but I decided against using them for two reasons:
1) Their support sucks. I shot an email to their support address about a week or two ago and have still not received any kind of response. Their most recent SVN commit is also close to a year old.
2) This issue raised on the Route Me repo, combined with their shoddy support, scared me away.
I did manage to find an SDK called MapBox that is also built on Route Me that was suitable for the task. Their git repo is in active development and they are available on freenode during normal business hours. I'd recommend them over CloudMade to anyone who has the same question I had initially.
It's not possible using UIMapKit.
I have used CloudMade before, which enable you to customise map colours quite extensively. As far as I know their maps use OpenStreetMap data.
No, it is not possible with the current MapKit.
Any substantial update like the one you describe would have to be performed when requesting tiles from Google, and at the moment only Apple does this, deep in the framework.
I'm writing an iOS application and it would be very handy to know the way to find a nearest business name (and especially business type, such as restaurant/hotel/store etc.) by a GPS coordinate, or at least by an address.
So just curious, is there such API/Web service out there?
Yes
Bing
Google Places
Yahoo Geo Technologies
I'm sure there are loads more to be found with a quick google
OK, it seems like I have to answer my own question. I didn't try it out in code, but the answer is here:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/
Unfortunately there seems to be a cap on how many times Google places API can be called (for free), i.e. 1000 times per day (for the same API_key.)
http://railskits.com/map/
Would you like to launch your own
google map mashup? Need a way to
easily get data onto a map, but don’t
want to have to dig through piles of
poorly documented Google Maps
javascript code?
The Map Rails Kit allows you to deploy
a map mashup instantly. It extracts
all the Google Maps implementation
details, organizes all the
customizations into an easy to use
config file, and reimplements the map
controls, bubbles, and markers so your
app looks unique.
Populating your map with markers
consists of working with a few simple
ActiveRecord models so it’s amazingly
easy to get started. Create marker
records with titles, bubble content,
and location. If you specify just an
address to your markers, your markers
will be automatically geocoded for
you. You can even add tens of
thousands of markers to your maps
easily, and they’ll dynamically load
onto the map only when they are
currently in view as your users
navigate the map.
The Kit includes all the usability
polish that your users would expect in
a commercial map mashup. Their current
map settings are always saved via
session so when they come back to the
page later on, they’re right where
they left off before. For new
visitors, we support hooking into an
ip2location service in order to
initialize their current position. So
they immediately see their current
spot on the map, and can begin
interacting with it.
This Kit was authored by Jacques
Crocker.
This is kind of subjective, but I don't find the Google Maps API nearly as daunting as the blurb makes it out to be. I don't think I'd pay half a grand for an API to the Maps API — especially since you can buy a whole book on the topic for like $15 even if you find Google's docs lacking.
This guy doesn't even make it clear what it is he's selling. He makes the features of using the google maps API with Rails sound more difficult than entire feature set of Google maps itself.
There are plenty of other plugins and/or gems available that do more or less the same thing with slightly more effort involved and the book of course (possibly more than one at this point).
If you want a turnkey solution for stacks of money, .NET or some more commercial platform will have more options. I would avoid using this guys solutions out of selfishness, if he does well they'll be others with more colorful marketing making such grand solutions. After which Google will be clogged with them and we'll have to wade through dozens of such spectacular offerings to find the better, albeit less polished (less advertised) open source versions.
Are there any good googlemaps plugins for rails?
I am working on integrating geolocation services into a website and the best source of data I've found so far is MaxMind's GeoIP API with GeoLite City data. Even this data seems to often be questionable though. For example, I am located in downtown Palo Alto, but it locates my IP as being in Portola Valley, which is about 7 miles away. Palo Alto has a population of 60k+, whereas Portola Valley has a population of less than 5k. I would think if you see an IP originating somewhere around there it would make more sense to assume it was coming from the highly populated city, not the tiny one. I've also had it locate Palo Alto IPs completely across the country in Kentucky, etc.
Does anyone know of any better sources of data, or any tools/technologies/efforts to improve the accuracy of geolocation efforts? Commercial solutions are fine.
Where an IP comes up at the wrong end of the country, you probably won't find a better match elsewhere because it's probably an ISP that uses one group of IPs for customers in a wide area. My favourite example is trains here in the UK where the on-board wifi is identified as being in Sweden because they use a satellite connection to an ISP in Sweden.
A commercial supplier may be able to afford to spend more time tracking down the hard cases, but in many cases there just won't be a good answer to give you. They may, however, give you a confidence factor to tell you when they're guessing. I've heard good things about Quova, though I've never used them.
Assuming that you've got the best latitude and longitude that you can get (or can afford), then you're left dealing with cases where they pick the closest city rather than a more likely larger city nearby. Unfortunately I don't have the code to hand, but I had some success using the data from geonames to pick a "sensible" city near a point. They list lat/long and population, so you can do something like
ORDER BY ( Distance / LOG( Population ) )
You'd need to experiment with that to get something with the right level of bias towards larger cities, but I had it working quite nicely taking the centre of a Google Maps view and displaying a heading like "Showing results near London..." that changed as you moved the map.
I am not sure if this will help, but here is a site that has done a pretty good job of IP mapping. Maybe you could ask them for help :) seomoz.org
A couple of sites I saw referenced recently for free GeoIP services are
WIPmania
hostip.info