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

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.

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.

You can either start with this pre-made image, or download a ruby script (requires RMagick and proj4r) and you can make your own.The pre-made image shows the area around CloudMade’s London offices in three styles; Web maps style, Mobile maps style and the award-winning OpenCycleMap style. Web maps style is a clean, general-purpose style showing the rich dataset that OpenStreetMap provides. Mobile maps style is a simple, high-contrast style which is ideal for low-resolution devices. The OpenCycleMap style is a specialist style created for cyclists using data from OpenStreetMap to highlight cyclepaths, bike parks, cycle shops and other features that are relevant to cyclists.

To assemble, you’ll need scissors and glue or tape. Start by printing the image.

Now cut out the image.

Fold along the centreline so that maps are showing on both sides, except for two triangles at the ends.

Holding the hexaflexamap by the near end in the picture above, fold the rest of the strip behind at the first join between two different map styles.

Fold behind again after the next change in map style.

Bring the tail end (on the right above) on top of the head.

Fold the white tab visible above and fold underneath, so that it faces the white tab that we started with and glue them together with paper glue. Tape also works, but thickens the hexaflexamap, which can make it more difficult to flex later on.

After waiting for the glue to dry, fold the hexaflexamap along its lines of symmetry and pinch one of the visible seams.

Looking into the centre, you should now be able to open out the hexaflexamap to reveal a new layer!

Have fun with hexaflexamaps!

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!

Generating cartograms can be quite easy as the authors of “Diffusion-based method for producing density equalizing maps” have generously made their software available online.

First the data needs to be collected. For the case of the POI cartogram, I used the PostGIS database commonly used for Mapnik rendering to extract the geographic distribution of POIs on an evenly spaced grid 1024×1024 pixels in size. When formatted as an ASCII text file, one line per row of space-separated decimal numbers, it can be fed into the cartogram software. This takes a while and tends to converge slowly when the deformation is very large – about 2 hours for the POIs graph on my laptop.

The cartogram software then outputs a 1025×1025 file in the same format giving the new locations for each of the pixel corners in the input file. This can be used to warp a shape file, in this case world_boundaries_m, and render with OpenJUMP to produce the pretty output above!

by Matt Amos, CloudMade London

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