I’ve been focused most recently on the news about Mapufacture joining with FortiusOne.

http://highearthorbit.com/mapufacture-joins-with-fortiusone/

It’s really exciting and provides a larger base to build the mapping technology we’ve been talking about in this forum and at conferences. In fact the new GeoCommons application coming out soon includes a number of features that Francine has specifically been looking for that have been missing from Mapufacture.

FortiusOne shares the same philosophy and standards as Mapufacture regarding free and open data and maps. In addition, they’ve focused more on quality attribution and metadata as well as precise tools for proper cartography. Important aspects that organizations have pointed out are missing from many of the other ‘mashup’ tools.

Mapufacture.com will stay up until all the pieces have been integrated into GeoCommons – so there shouldn’t be any interruption of the current maps. I’m also looking forward to showing off the newest tools and helping the community create some really powerful maps.

Regarding the time slider – you can also just drag out the time slider itself to view the entire time range. I believe there has been requests to Google to modify the behavior of Google Earth when loading KML files with long date ranges.

Is there a link directly to the Turner map .gif or .jpg? Easy to overlay that in Google Earth.

As for the Google Earth time slider, there must be a way to have all the pushpins for the data show up at once. As it is I have to select from the Sidebar as the data I’m intrested may or may not show up on the map depending on the position of the time slider.

I rewrote the Google Earth file without the refresh tags, and that seems to have fixed the crash. The photo links however are not working. For instance: this link is in the Lafron Elementary write up : http://www.flickr.com/photos/xxno/2625033215

But clicking on it brings me to http://mapufacture.com/feeds

This information is not included in the .kml file, it seems to be loaded from a mapufacture served .kml file.

You’re right that the 30-second update for any of the layers in the KML is not always necessary. This is a default from any Mapufacture map since the underlying data can be dynamic. For example, new Flickr photos or blog posts.

The historic Taylor map actually isn’t in the KML and so won’t show up in Google Earth or other KML clients. This is something that could be added at some point.

Finally, for the time slider – this is part of the Google Earth API and isn’t controllable by the KML file.

I’m not sure why Google Earth would have crashed. This shouldn’t be possible with a KML file – I’ve done files with tens of thousands of markers, and you can turn on all the GeoWeb layers to get some interesting overwhelming amount of information.

There are definitely some fancy things going on in that Google Earth file. I think one time upload of the Taylor map should do the trick, refreshing every 30 seconds is probably a little much for an 80 year old map . In fact, any refresh for this data is probably overkill. If we get to the point that this people are uploading data that quickly, that’s a good problem to have.

This is my first reaction to the .kml file. Perhaps as I poke around in it a little more I’ll understand a little more about the intent.

Sorry for my first post to be criticism, but I do intend for it to be constructive. I guess this is the beauty of the “mashup”. Always a work in progress.

Sorry about that.

Tried it fresh on safari (never use it)
and cleared cache on ff. I am emailing screenshots to Andrew

Here is a screenshot of it working in my browser:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajturner/2655872493/

I still need to get a better aliased map thumbnail at zoomed-out levels so it looks nicer.

I don’t think that’s the most updated version. It does show the 1924 map, but the flickr layer is incorrect. It feeds uploads from regional.modernism instead of a feed of photos from group: Mid-century modern schools.

Sorry for the delay.

Alan

please update mapsthinknola to reflect current edits

thank you

David – have you met up yet with Alan? It sounds like you’re going the right direction, using the appropriate tool for the job (e.g. Excel). The next steps will be to easily share that via a format like KML to visualize on a map.

I’ve always found this article form Microsoft, of all places, on web usability to be a helpful when thinking about web design. It’s an old article that is still valid today, even with all the Ajaxy / Scripty wonderment of Web 2.0. The idea is that, unlike old UIs that are mainly deductive, a collection of widgets and you click the widgets to see what they do, web UIs are inductive, or basically, a page equates to a task.

Inductive User Interface Design.

This probably applies more to the email list manager I’ve developing, or in the longer run, the presentation designer interface for our mapping application. Are we still calling it MapSquared?