mattyj wrote:One question is how much horizontal accuracy I need. I probably don't need to update the display every time the cursor moves a pixel; every 2nd pixel should be enough. If I could get away with every 4th pixel, that would seriously cut down on the amount of data I'd need to pull back every time the map moves. It's hard to see exactly what the hand's centered on anyway. Any strong opinions?

In order to plot the hill shading, you must be pulling in data from NED or some other DEM source. Can you just show elevation if shading is enabled? Or do you throw that info away once you have the color code for shading at each pixel?

The hillshading is already rendered, and gets sent over to the client as a grayscale image. I have all the NED data in an accessible form, so I don't have to rely on Google's elevation service or anything, but it's still potentially a lot of data to push out to the client.

Obviously looking at a static map, it's pretty simple to request an elevation grid and display the cursor's elevation. Doing it in an efficient way when the user is constantly panning around and zooming in/out requires maintaining some kind of a cache, de-prioritizing elevation requests so the map tiles load quickly, and similar stuff that Google Maps handles out of the box for raster tiles. Not insurmountable but not trivial either. The less data I have to pull back, the sloppier my implementation can be without slowing things down.

Then don't do it! Not worth the pain. Maybe if someone is forced to request the elevation
"here" you can just pull in 4 bounding points from the DEM. But it sounds like a lot of hassle for a service rarely requested. And I'd hate to have people put too much trust in NED

MoapaPk wrote:Then don't do it! Not worth the pain. Maybe if someone is forced to request the elevation
"here" you can just pull in 4 bounding points from the DEM. But it sounds like a lot of hassle for a service rarely requested. And I'd hate to have people put too much trust in NED

I'll admit that I find it most useful when panning around metric contour maps. I can't do the conversion very quick in my head. There are other times when I'm not zoomed in but looking at the big picture and can't read the contour values. I might want to know something like how high the plateau is (roughly) on one side of a range vs. another side. But I didn't know about the right-click, Point Info feature. That will work.

And while we have your attention, Google's pegman is really helpful and built into the v3 API. Let's you look at a TH or side road to see if there are things like No Trespassing signs. Or whether a building on the side of the road is abandoned. That one should be easy to incorporate.

mattyj wrote: An instant elevation readout under the coordinates is on the to-do list

this is one of the features I would use the most often on the TOPO! california nat geo software until my disc went defunct. Now I have defaulted to caltopo.

heya mattyj, just adding that as your product has added more and more functionality, it's become a more important part of my toolbox.

among other things, i used the slope angle function for a [potentially] new snow climb route we were trying to run this last weekend, and it was great. i won't say we couldn't have done the route without it, but it sure made it easier. thanks for all the enhancements you've made to it. it's come a loooong way.

results here:

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/ ... 74252.jpeg

I added cursor elevation and google streetview.

Cursor elevation is off by default, at least until I work out the bugs and make sure the elevation requests don't overwhelm my server. In the left bar, click "Show More" and then check "Include Elevation". After the initial selection, this will live as a browser cookie - it shouldn't be something you have to do every time you visit the site. The elevation tiles are only loaded after the rest of the map loads, so there may be a short delay when panning/zooming until elevation data is available again.

For now, streetview is only available when using a Google base layer (map, terrain, satellite, hybrid). This isn't a technical limitation, but streetview doesn't have coverage for a lot of backcountry spots and I didn't want to add a separate checkbox to enable it, so it seemed like a good initial compromise.

mattyj wrote:For now, streetview is only available when using a Google base layer (map, terrain, satellite, hybrid). This isn't a technical limitation, but streetview doesn't have coverage for a lot of backcountry spots and I didn't want to add a separate checkbox to enable it, so it seemed like a good initial compromise.

Matt,

Why not leave it on for all views by default? There are other maps where I'd use it regularly like topo and visitor maps. If you select the pegman and you see no blue, you'll know there aren't streetviews available . Not sure why you'd need a separate checkbox. Thanks for the addition, btw. The daily dosage is getting so high, I don't think I'll ever get off this drug...

Personally, since most of the places I'm looking at don't have streetview available, I find the brightly colored pegman to be a visual distraction. I try to use bright colors conservatively and my eye keeps getting drawn back to it - so there are times when I just want the control to go away. Maybe I'm the only one who feels that way.

I know it's not a perfect solution, but at least until it has time to grow on me, I want a way for the streetview control to be optional. Hence a checkbox in the left bar, only showing it on Google layers, or maybe I'll stumble on some better option. You can still use it with visitor maps, you just have to have a google map as the base layer and then add the visitor map as an overlay through "+ Add Layer".

This is pretty standard for how I try to release new features. If I were a larger company with a design team, QA team and so on, I'd whip up a bunch of prototypes, settle on a design, and release it when complete. Since it's just me, I often push a feature in some limited or half-hidden way, let it sit for a bit and then take another pass at it.

I may well turn street view on 24/7, but I need some more time to play with it as-is and think about ways to make the control less visually distracting.

Ah, I see if I just add a topo layer on top at 100% I can get what I want. I often have the land management layer turned on which is a rainbow of color, so the pegman being yellow isn't much of distraction to me. But I understand your points and appreciate the effort you put into it.
I find it annoying that you have to actually grab the pegman to see where the streetviews are available,but that's a google issue. Seems it might be better if the blue color appeared when one simply hovers over pegman. If anybody out there working for Google (Matthew?) sees this, please use this week's "20% personal project" time to fix this. That is all.