CloudMade releases Style Editor 1.1
Great news for Style Editor users: we’ve launched an updated version of Style Editor (v1.1) that makes discovering, sharing and creating new map styles even easier!
Style Editor is CloudMade’s online cartography tool for creating customized map styles. Application developers can use Style Editor to quickly create their own map styles that give applications a unique look & feel. Style Editor gives you complete control over which objects are displayed on the map, and how they will appear on your map at each zoom level. Developers use CloudMade’s Style Editor to design customized maps built for a particular use. For example, if you were building a cycling application that helps users get from point A to point B by bicycle, you’d want to highlight the cycle paths and roads better suited for cyclists while de-emphasising main roads and motorways.
Style Editor now has a style gallery for discovering new map styles
The most important improvements in Style Editor 1.1 is the addition of the style gallery. Style gallery will allow you to quickly discover public map styles created by CloudMade and our community. Style Editor also allows for private styles available only to the author, which you can view by pressing the My Styles tab on the Style Editor toolbar. By default the map styles are sorted by popularity. You may also chose to look for CloudMade styles which were created by professional cartographers including some by Stamen Design by clicking on the CloudMade tab. Or you can browse the featured styles (Featured tab) which showcase a mix of CloudMade and community styles that our cartographers deem fantanstic!
The Style Editor tool bar allows for quick discovery of public maps styles for editing or direct use
Another cool new feature in style gallery is the ability to sort map styles based on color. To the top of the Style Editor toolbar is a Color Filter control. This control will filter map styles in the gallery based on where you drag the Color Filter bar. The default setting on the far left shows all colors. By dragging the Color Bar towards the right, you can select only the map styles with a particular shade of yellow, for example. In this way you can find map styles that suit the look and feel of your website or application. Don’t forget to reset the Color Bar back to the far left when your done so that you can see all the styles again.
Each map style in the style gallery shows the style name, author and style ID. The style ID comes in handy when coding with CloudMade’s API libraries. You can quickly change the Style ID and see a completely different map in your app! The search bar in the far right of the tool bar allows for style searches based on style name, author or style ID.
The last new feature we wanted to talk about is the Style RSS feed. You can now subscribe to all new style updates via RSS. This is a super easy way to get all the latest updates to Style Gallery via RSS. You can subscribe here.
- Style Editor is open to the public and available to use as a free service here. So go ahead and start creating your own new map styles and publish them to Style Gallery so the world can see and use them!
Style Editor Team @CloudMade
Creating new map styles is simple with CloudMade's Style Editor
July 16th, 2009 - Posted by Cragg Nilson in cartography, cloudmade, developers, maps, openstreetmap, style editor, tips, tools | | 1 Comments
How to get through the first stage of the job interview process
CloudMade is hiring. We’re looking for Community Ambassadors, Product Managers and a Senior Director of Developer Outreach to join our growing team. The current job market favours employers – there are a lot of highly qualified people looking for work. So how can you make sure that your CV gets in front of the right person and you get your dream job? Here are five tips that will help you get through the first stage of an interview process and get a first interview at your future employer.
Professional
Around 10% of the CVs and applications I receive have spelling, grammar or formatting errors in them. No matter what role you are applying for, obvious errors like this are un-professional. The problem is not that you can’t spell. It’s that you have not taken the time or been resourceful enough to make sure that your work is produced to a professional standard. I consider a candidate’s CV to be their first assignment. If they don’t deliver a professional CV, they aren’t going to deliver professional work as an employee. Ask your friends and family to read over your CV and covering letter for you – a fresh set of eyes often spots unseen errors.
Pre-Emptive
Make the hiring manager’s life easy for them. If the job notice asks for CV as a PDF, send a PDF. Give your CV a sensible file name, like joe_blogs_cloudmade_cv.pdf and not jb_cm_cv.pdf. As an employee you wouldn’t want to make your manager’s life difficult, so don’t do it as a candidate.
Personal
Address the hiring manager and the company personally. “Dear Sir or Madam” is just lazy. Find out who the hiring manager is. If the job notice does not have this information, call the hiring manager’s PA or the company secretary and find out. Make contact with the hiring manager on LinkedIn and follow them on Twitter.
Personalize
Find out what the company you are applying to does and what they want from the position. If you are applying for a position as a Developer Evangelist and your cover letter and CV do not mention developer evangelism activities you are not going to get through the first round.
Persistent
If you really, really believe you are right for the job, don’t give up. Maybe your CV or cover letter were not quite right. You’ll never know unless you keep on trying.
Consider your job application your first piece of work for your prospective employer. Really try to think about what they want to see in a candidate and make sure your CV and covering letter sells your unique qualities to your now employer.
The news is full of stories about lay-offs and job cuts – but lots of companies are still hiring. You have to compete with more candidates, so follow these tips and give yourself the edge.
April 4th, 2009 - Posted by Nick Black in Jobs, cloudmade, tips | | 8 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
Hexaflexamaps
Looking through a very old copy of Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games, I stumbled upon his article about Flexagons and thought “what would these look like with maps on them?”. This is what they look like (at a really low resolution), but it is much more fun to make your own…
November 12th, 2008 - Posted by Matt Amos in ruby, tips | | 15 Comments
Where’s interesting?
Visualising geographic statistics usually means drawing a coloured map (called a choropleth), but this can be confusing as the human brain tends to associate importance with the area covered. For example, first impressions of the choropleth for the U.S. presidential elections would give the misleading impression that the Republicans won, as 56% of the map pixels are red. However, there is a different style of maps (called cartograms) in which the map is warped such that the area is proportional to the data being visualised.
We can use cartograms of OpenStreetMap data to present a more visually striking and interesting view of the world. For example, here is a cartogram of the distribution of Points of Interest (POIs). It is immediately obvious that most of the POIs in the world are either in the United Kingdom or Germany, but there are other interesting POI-rich pockets; the Philippines, Brasil, South Africa and Eastern Australia. Many thanks to all the contributors in these areas for their fantastic work!
November 7th, 2008 - Posted by Matt Amos in openstreetmap, tips, tools | | 4 Comments
Add Custom SQL to Rails Active Record Migrations
Ruby on Rails’ Migrations offer a nice alternative to traditional SQL DDL statements, that fit in with the Rails agile development philosophy. Migrations let you use Ruby code to create, alter and drop databases and tables, allowing you, amongst other things to switch databases mid-development, without having to refine your SQL.
Such convenience can sometimes mean a lack of flexibility. If you are trying to add a column to a MySQL database with type bigint unsigned, you’ll run into problems as ActiveRecord does not support unsinged bigints. You can solve the problem with some creative use of Ruby’s command line execution features – any code in a ruby file that is included between backticks(’ ` ‘) will be executed as a command line argument – so now you can include custom SQL statements without losing the benefits of Migrations:
class MyClass < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
remove_column :mytable, 
ld_column
puts `mysql database -u user -ppassword
-e 'alter table mytable add column new_column bigint unsigned'`
end
..
..
end
April 10th, 2007 - Posted by in ruby, ruby on rails, tips | | 0 Comments
