(Nearly) Live Tiles
Waiting to see your edits is boring. Worse than that, it delays the sense of satisfaction that comes with seeing your contributions and reduces the addictiveness of mapping.
At CloudMade, we’ve been running prototype (nearly) live updating tile servers internally for a while, but we thought it would be nice to share these with the community. This sandbox tile server is updated from the minute diffs and runs approximately 10 minutes behind the main database, due to the time necessary to dump the diffs, download and import them. You can see the results here by switching back and forth between the minutely layer and the weekly layer. (Thanks to Shaun for the continuous stream of edits!)
If you’re looking at an area and you think that it should be updated, try hitting the permalink and refreshing a few times, as your browser may be showing you cached tiles.
Please feel free to use these tiles, but remember that this is an experimental sandbox – please don’t download tiles in bulk. The server will be slow under high load so, please, if you see a warning message then come back a few minutes later.
Enjoy!
(Nearly) Live TilesJanuary 23rd, 2009 - Posted by Matt Amos in openstreetmap | | 18 Comments
on January 23rd, 2009 at 5:39 pm
This is brilliant. Osmarender just doesn’t cut it for me in really built up areas (there’s a little bit of Durham City that applies), and they’re the areas that I want to check for text clashes or oddities when I upload my added data.
on January 24th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Excellent work Matt. It looks awesome, and make it work in a NoName render makes it pretty useful.
on January 24th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Wonderful! It works!
It is really useful thing for mappers, easy to check your map displaying.
on January 25th, 2009 at 4:34 am
[...] out the full post from CloudMade’s blog here: http://blog.cloudmade.com/2009/01/23/nearly-live-tiles/ This was written by matt. Posted on Saturday, January 24, 2009, at 9:32 pm. Filed under Events, [...]
on January 25th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Waow… pretty cool !!!
Greetings from Africa
)
on February 1st, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Thanks, this is very useful for street name mapping expeditions. One thing though – viewed in Firefox the Print Preview (and perhaps printing itself) doesn’t work, although the slippy map on openstreetmap.org works fine. Could you look at what code difference is affecting printing?
on February 1st, 2009 at 7:02 pm
@Ed Avis:
I’d like to investigate this further, but the print preview and printer output look fine here. I’m running Firefox 3.0.5 on Ubuntu 8.10 amd64. What version and OS are you running?
on February 4th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
@matt: I am using Windows XP with either a Firefox nightly build (3.2a1pre) or Google Chrome – both print a mostly-blank page with no map tiles on it. (Chrome doesn’t have Print Preview but PP in Firefox shows the same blankness.)
Internet Explorer 8 rc1 is okay, as are Opera 9.63 and Safari 3.2.1.
I have seen the same problem with Fedora 10 (which uses Firefox 3.1, at least after you apply updates). The openstreetmap.org site prints correctly but yours comes out blank.
on February 5th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
@Ed Avis,
This appears to be a bug in the latest webkit and Geko rendering engines, whereby when the map is set to be a percentage of the window, it will not print. When we specify the explicit height and width in pixels, it will print.
on February 5th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
@Ed Avis,
I think the problem might be fixed. Maybe… I cribbed some JavaScript functions from the OSM homepage which seemed to be relevant. I now can’t reproduce the problem on FF 3.2a1pre linux amd64. How does it look to you?
on February 10th, 2009 at 4:48 am
Great job! It was so boring having to wait until wednesday to see my changes on the map. Thank you!
on February 20th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
@matt: I think printing is fixed now, thanks!
on April 5th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Great map! A minor detail; it seems paths have gone missing (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dpath)…
on May 5th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Are the tiles being updated? For example I made some changes to several hours ago but the tile is still unchanged.
on May 5th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Are the tiles being updated? For example I made some changes to http://matt.sandbox.cloudmade.com/?zoom=11&lat=51.5189&lon=-0.09397&layers=B0 several hours ago but the tile http://c.matt.sandbox.cloudmade.com/123/3/256/16/32094/24709.png is still unchanged.
(silly comment form doesn’t know how to escape angle brackets)
on May 5th, 2009 at 10:18 am
@Ed Avis:
Since the change to the 0.6 API, the minutely tile server seems to be having a few problems. I’ll upgrade it to the latest versions of everything and do a full planet-reload this week. It should be possible to do it without any further disruption and I’ll post on this blog when its back to its former glory
on May 20th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
The minutely noname tile server is currently even more outdated than the weekly one. Any news on when it might be working again? I’m missing seeing the results of my work filling in street names.
on June 19th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
@matt: have you found some time to look into this?