Bringing Melways into the Google era
| Posted in Geek | Posted on 09-01-2006
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For a while, Jezza and I have been mucking around with the Melways maps from street-directory.com.au. We’ve been working out ways to actually make their web site much better than it currently is. It was always painful to try and navigate your way through the little 300x300px window at a zoom level that was easy enough so that you could actually read the street names. We made a page that let us navigate the maps using your full browser window, and let you click to center the map. Life was good.
Recently, Jezza and I have been talking about making draggable maps, in the same fashion as google and yahoo maps. Using some great GPL javascript from the guys at openstreetmap.org, I have managed to interface their draggable map code to use the street-directory interface.
You can either search for an address or get started right away on the Melbourne CBD. It’s only working in Mozilla/Firefox at the moment, but it should soon be working in IE and Safari. I’m not sure if Konqueror can handle it though. Have a play, and leave some comments.
One problem I am aware of is that the point you search for (lat/lon) isn’t centered on the map. This is most annoying when zooming, becuase this can throw you right off what you were looking for
Maaaaaaate,
Does your search feature only work for Victoria? Couldn’t get it to find my parents house back in Brisbane.
Adam
Possibly. Hasn’t been tested much outside Vic. I’ll have a look at that
Off topic:
Andy, we should consider ourselves Internet soulmates since we’re both CS majors with 5G iPods, T610s, and Linux desktops. Your guides have been quite helpful. Thanks.
No probs! Not only does it help my memory to document stuff, i’m glad its helpful to others too.
Andy, you should try to market this to Melways, I think you could actually make $$ from this if you were interested