Fly Through Berlin
CloudMade partners, Cartotype have produced this nice animation that shows a fly-through of Berlin. Cartotype produce a range of libraries that render maps across different mobile platforms:
Cartotype have been experimenting with CloudMade’s Vector Server which can stream map data to any connected device where it can be rendered on the fly. There’s a lot of new features planned for the vector server, including multiple outputs formats (XML, JSON, OSM) and a fully featured API that will let you select which parts of the map data are returned to the client. You can see all of the feature requests here.
If you like what you see from Cartotype, you can hear them talk at the State of the Map conference which is being held from the 10th – 12th July 2009 in Amsterdam. Click here for more details.
June 15th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in api, cartography, cloudmade, developers, geodata, news, products | | 0 Comments
How To Get Forward Geocoding in iPhone MapKit
The CoreLocation and MapKit sessions at WWDC yesterday gave an insight to some of the powerful technology that the iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone 3G S will bring to application developers. The new compass and enhanced accelerometer support that the combination of new hardware and software bring were a big hit with the WWDC crowd. The incomplete feature sets around MapKit were less of a hit.
MapKit seeks to be a very well implemented iPhone mapping library, that lets developers add Google maps to their iPhone applications as well as perform reverse geocoding. Sadly for iPhone developers, the fun stops with reverse geocoding. Forward geocoding (the process of turning an address into a latitude and longitude) is not available in MapKit. The reasons for this lie in complex licensing agreements between Apple, Google and TomTom (who own all of the map data that Google and Apple use). CloudMade will help you avoid the complexity.
iPhone Developers at WWDC were urged to use external geocoding services by the iPhone engineering team. CloudMade’s geocoding service fits the bill perfectly. iPhone developers can integrate CloudMade’s geocoding web-services directly into their MapKit applications, without worrying about breaking and terms of service. The geocoding web service looks like this:
http://geocoding.cloudmade.com/BC9A493B41014CAABB98F0471D759707/
geocoding/find/moscone center west.html
Lets take a closer look at the URL:
http://geocoding.cloudmade.com/ – the base URL
BC9A493B41014CAABB98F0471D759707/ – your API key, available here
geocoding/find – the “find” method, more docs here
moscone center west – the text string to search for
.html choose from HTML or JSON output.
Click here to see the result.
You can find our more about CloudMade’s geocoding services here.
June 12th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in REST, Uncategorized, api, developers, iPhone, products | | 8 Comments
CloudMade WWDC iPhone Developer Party
Last night’s iPhone Developer Party was a huge success – with around 200 developers joining the CloudMade team to celebrate the inauguration of the “CloudMade Developer Award”. The Spring award went to Felix Lamouroux, creator of the smash hit iPhone applications Trails and OffMaps.
Felix Lamouroux, creator of Trails and OffMaps received the inaugural CloudMade Developer Award
OffMaps up-close. OffMaps lets you view CloudMade maps offline – never be stuck without a map in a foreign city again
The crowd gather in Swig, San Francisco to hear about CloudMade’s newly released iPhone libraries
June 11th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in cloudmade, events, iPhone, products | | 1 Comments
Three New Style Editor Basemaps
Nick blogged previously regarding three of our signature map styles – “Pale Dawn“, “Midnight Commander” and “Fresh” – that we launched along with our Developer Programme last month. Today we’re pleased to announce that all three styles are now available for customization in our Style Editor.
Our Style Editor lets you tweak, change and configure the cartography of our maps to suit your needs. Perhaps you, as I do, love the Pale Dawn style as originally created by Stamen Design, but want to see if it looks better with a bit more emphasis on parks and public transport? So I fired up the Style Editor, and a few clicks later had this attempt – “Fair Sunrise”:
We’re always interested in what creative things you can make with our tools, so if you’ve made a style that you’re proud of please share a link in our comments. I’ll let you decide for yourself whether you think “Fair Sunrise” is an improvement!
March 26th, 2009 - Posted by Andy Allan in api, cloudmade, developers, products, tools | | 2 Comments
A Summary of the Future of Mapping
Over the last few days we’ve launched the CloudMade Developer Programme in front of packed audiences in San Francisco and London. There was a real buzz at both events – a feeling that the tools and services we’ve been working on are going to make a real difference to developers.
There’s a lot of anticipation at CloudMade about the applications that can be built using our mapping APIs. If you’re looking for inspiration, you need a quick recap, or you couldn’t make it to the events, read on to find out more.
February 16th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in api, clients, cloudmade, developers, openstreetmap, products, talks | | 6 Comments
Introducing the CloudMade Developer Zone
The CloudMade Developer Zone launched last week in San Francisco. We’ll be bring the launch to London this Thursday February 12th. There will be keynotes, live demonstrations from CloudMade partners that will include social networking, navigation, real estate, personal tracking, fleet tracking applications and more. There are only a few places left, so please sign-up now to avoid disappointment.
The CloudMade Developer Zone has all the resources developers need to get started building awesome location based applications. Here are some highlights:
Video Tutorials
Video tutorials are a great way to get started with a new tool quickly. We’re going to be publishing lots more screen casts, like this one about our Style Editor:
CloudMade StyleEditor ScreenCast from CloudMade on Vimeo.
If you’ve been using any of our tools or APIs, you can create a screen cast and have it featured on the site. You could show how to make an amazing map style using the Style Editor, how to take our Ruby API and integrate it into a Rails application or how to use our open source repositories to modify our iPhone Maps Library. Email in your screen casts here and we’ll get back to you.
Open Source Libraries and APIs
We want to make it as easy as possible for you to get started using our services. So that you can be up and running with as little hassle as possible, we have open source libraries for Ruby, Java, Python and iPhone Objective-C. From the Developer Zone you can browse and check-out the source code, join the project and contribute back to the community. There’s also step-by-step tutorials for each library and wiki pages where you can add any tips you might have.
You can find out more about the Developer Zone here.
February 9th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in api, cloudmade, developers, products, ruby, tips | | 8 Comments
San Francisco Bay Area Developers’ Evening
Our first developers’ evening will be held at 18.30pm on the the 31st July at our Menlo Park offices. Anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area who has an interest in location aware applications, mapping, GPS and free data is invited to attend the event, which is guaranteed to include insight, intrigue, sneak-previews and free pizza.
OpenStreetMap and CloudMade founder, Steve Coast, will share his insights into the world of collaborative map making, talking about why the world needs free and open geodata, why traditional models of map making are not cut out for a world where maps form a core part of everyday life. You’ll hear how your applications can benefit from the rich map data that OpenStreetMap has to offer.
From mobile phones, to satellite navigation, from mashups to social networks – maps are everywhere. Yet most of the maps we use each day are owned by two companies – Tom-Tom and Nokia. We think that maps are too important to be controlled by a handful of governments and companies. Everyday tens of thousands of OpenStreetMap volunteers around the world are helping to liberate map data by making maps which can be used free of charge by anyone, anywhere in the world for almost any use you can imagine.
By packaging OpenStreetMap data into a set of high quality, professional products and services, CloudMade are shaking up the existing market place. CloudMade co-founder, Nick Black, will talk about their existing APIs which allow developers to embed high quality maps in web and mobile applications as well as talking about future plans for some exciting new APIs and services.
Developers will have the opportunity to talk to the CloudMade team who will be on hand to answer questions about their current and future plans over a slice of pizza and a drink.
Registration for this event is free. To register, click here.
For more information, email nick@cloudmade.com
July 24th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in events, geodata, openstreetmap, products, talks | | 2 Comments
Product Blog – Two New pre-Alpha APIs from CloudMade
Last week we took the covers off our new CloudMade website – if you haven’t had a look already, head over to CloudMade.com and see for yourself.
We also released two new APIs as pre-Alpha services: theWeb Maps API and the Mobile Maps API. Right now these services are targeted at developers who want to get their hands on the very latest things we have to offer. Both APIs are accessed by directly calling our tile server, though the observant amongst you will probably have noticed slippy maps present on lots of our pages. We’ll be releasing documentation for the slippy map API shortly, so watch this space.
We’re particularly excited about the Mobile Maps API, which gives developers access to a set of tiles which we’ve started to optimize for mobile use. By reducing the tile size to 64×64 pixels (rather than the usual 256×256) and simplifying the cartography we’re keeping tile sizes down to around 2-3kB. This is a first pass and we hope to get the sizes down even more to help mobile applications save on costly bandwidth and enhance user experience.
Because both these services are built on top of OpenStreetMap data you can use them in almost any way you like. Most other online map providers don’t let you use their maps in mobile devices or for real time routing or tracking or outside of their own APIs, for example. We want you to use CloudMade maps for the coolest things you can think of.
If you are itching to play with either the Web or Mobile Maps API, you can request an API key here – I can’t promise that you’ll get access straight away, but we will get back to you as soon as the API is ready. We’ve also got a developers mailing list which you can sign up to here.
Both images based on map data created by OpenStreetMap.org contributors and licensed CCBYSA.
June 4th, 2008 - Posted by Nick Black in api, cloudmade, geodata, news, products, tools | | 0 Comments
